BitCluster script shows the connection between Bitcoin wallets and transactions
Link analysis can be performed for large sites in a darkweb and a regular network.
Bitcoin is a great alternative to ordinary money. But this system is still not completely anonymous, as many believe - you can identify the user. True, for this you need to “light up” at least once, it’s almost impossible to reveal the identity of a very careful user. But you can track all user transactions and without his identification.
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Now Bitcoin experts presented a tool that allows you to group transactions according to several criteria: wallet, trading platform or a specific user. This tool does not identify the user’s identity, but is able to show all the details of a whole series of payments.
“Our goal is to show how much data can be collected about users of a bitcoin network, whether it’s possible to find common parameters for wallets that seem anonymous and unrelated to each other,” says one researcher, David DeCary-Hétu ). The team of specialists that has created its own software tool works in the School of Criminology at the University of Montreal.
The first version of its software, written in Python, the developers showed at the NorthSec 2015 conference. The tool is called BitCluster. It analyzes transactions between individual addresses, and shows the detected connections. The results of the script can be downloaded as a table.
Screenshot of transaction analysis results for one of the stores in a darkweb
Instead of tracking transactions at a specific address, the script tracks all transfers related to a specific user. This may be a dragdiler, a fraudster (creator of a cryptographer) or a regular user of the system. Experts will present new results of research on analyzing operations in a darkwalk using BitCluster at the HOPE event.
In most cases, the creators of cryptographers provide a wallet to which the victim must send the means to get the decryption key of their files. Attackers can thus track payment by individual users. If the creators of the cryptographer add up all the received cryptographic coins in one wallet, you can see how much is “earned”, when and who sent the first transaction. This can be learned without a script, but it allows you to quickly perform the necessary operations.
In addition, BitCluster can distinguish groups of interconnected wallets that are used to conduct transactions for specific sites - for example, to identify the purses of sites used to hold customer funds in the course of a transaction with the seller or supplier of a particular service. Researchers have already done the analysis for the original Silk Road, and work has also been done on studying new markets, including AlphaBay and Nucleus. Using the available information, the script shows how many people make payments at a single point in time, how many transactions are completed and for how much. The size of the average transaction is also shown.
Previous studies have also shown the possibility of linking the conducted transactions to specific users of the site when studying the time of posting a withdrawal of a transaction. This work was also carried out using BitCluster.
Soon, developers will lay out their script to the public. The team does not want to host this tool, since it is very resource-intensive, and for analyzing large amounts of data (for example, on the Mt. Gox site), powerful servers are needed.
The script can be used not only by researchers. Militiamen can work with him. “Our goal is not to help the victims or law enforcement. This is an open source tool that helps people better understand how the Bitcoin network works and what happens on this network, ”says one of the creators of the script.
The tool is not able to handle some types of operations. For example, there are services that divide a transaction by sending it to a user-specified sample of wallets that are not related to each other. Another option to avoid tracking your payments is to create a new wallet for each transaction. The script cannot link such transactions. It will show general wallets and transactions only if payments after separation are still sent to a single account.
Bitcoin is a great alternative to ordinary money. But this system is still not completely anonymous, as many believe - you can identify the user. True, for this you need to “light up” at least once, it’s almost impossible to reveal the identity of a very careful user. But you can track all user transactions and without his identification.
')
Now Bitcoin experts presented a tool that allows you to group transactions according to several criteria: wallet, trading platform or a specific user. This tool does not identify the user’s identity, but is able to show all the details of a whole series of payments.
“Our goal is to show how much data can be collected about users of a bitcoin network, whether it’s possible to find common parameters for wallets that seem anonymous and unrelated to each other,” says one researcher, David DeCary-Hétu ). The team of specialists that has created its own software tool works in the School of Criminology at the University of Montreal.
The first version of its software, written in Python, the developers showed at the NorthSec 2015 conference. The tool is called BitCluster. It analyzes transactions between individual addresses, and shows the detected connections. The results of the script can be downloaded as a table.
Screenshot of transaction analysis results for one of the stores in a darkweb
Instead of tracking transactions at a specific address, the script tracks all transfers related to a specific user. This may be a dragdiler, a fraudster (creator of a cryptographer) or a regular user of the system. Experts will present new results of research on analyzing operations in a darkwalk using BitCluster at the HOPE event.
In most cases, the creators of cryptographers provide a wallet to which the victim must send the means to get the decryption key of their files. Attackers can thus track payment by individual users. If the creators of the cryptographer add up all the received cryptographic coins in one wallet, you can see how much is “earned”, when and who sent the first transaction. This can be learned without a script, but it allows you to quickly perform the necessary operations.
In addition, BitCluster can distinguish groups of interconnected wallets that are used to conduct transactions for specific sites - for example, to identify the purses of sites used to hold customer funds in the course of a transaction with the seller or supplier of a particular service. Researchers have already done the analysis for the original Silk Road, and work has also been done on studying new markets, including AlphaBay and Nucleus. Using the available information, the script shows how many people make payments at a single point in time, how many transactions are completed and for how much. The size of the average transaction is also shown.
Previous studies have also shown the possibility of linking the conducted transactions to specific users of the site when studying the time of posting a withdrawal of a transaction. This work was also carried out using BitCluster.
Soon, developers will lay out their script to the public. The team does not want to host this tool, since it is very resource-intensive, and for analyzing large amounts of data (for example, on the Mt. Gox site), powerful servers are needed.
The script can be used not only by researchers. Militiamen can work with him. “Our goal is not to help the victims or law enforcement. This is an open source tool that helps people better understand how the Bitcoin network works and what happens on this network, ”says one of the creators of the script.
The tool is not able to handle some types of operations. For example, there are services that divide a transaction by sending it to a user-specified sample of wallets that are not related to each other. Another option to avoid tracking your payments is to create a new wallet for each transaction. The script cannot link such transactions. It will show general wallets and transactions only if payments after separation are still sent to a single account.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/396081/
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