Giulia Fanti
Carnegie Mellon University
Privacy Vulnerabilities in the Peer-to-Peer Network of Cryptocurrencies
Recently, researchers have demonstrated deanonymization attacks that exploit weaknesses in the Bitcoin network's peer-to-peer (P2P) networking protocols. In particular, the P2P network currently forwards content in a structured way that allows observers to link users' Bitcoin addresses to their IP addresses. This is a substantial privacy vulnerability that extends to several other cryptocurrencies as well. In this talk, I will discuss how these attacks work, and how effective they are at deanonymizing users. I will also talk about countermeasures, including proposed modifications to the networking stack.
References
- An analysis of anonymity in Bitcoin using P2P traffic by Philip Koshy, Diana Koshy, and Patrick McDaniel; FC 2014
- Deanonymisation of clients in Bitcoin P2P network by Alex Biryukov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Ivan Pustogarov; CCS 2014
- Dandelion: Redesigning the bitcoin network for anonymity by Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan, Giulia Fanti, and Pramod Viswanath; Sigmetrics 2017
- Anonymity properties of the Bitcoin P2P network by Giulia Fanti and Pramod Viswanath; NeurIPS 2017
Giulia Fanti is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests span the algorithmic foundations of blockchains, distributed systems, privacy-preserving technologies, and machine learning.
She is a fellow for the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Cybersecurity, and has received a best paper award at ACM Sigmetrics and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She obtained her Ph.D. in EECS from U.C. Berkeley and her B.S. in ECE from Olin College of Engineering.