The crypto-currency Bitcoin has become the preferred payment method for much of the online underground. Sarah Meiklejohn and her colleagues at UCSD and George Mason University have found that a little snooping in the blockchain can often uncover who owns which of those Bitcoin addresses. In a paper they’re presenting at the Internet Measurement Conference in Barcelona next month, they showed that they could use “clustering” methods taking advantage of clues in how bitcoins are typically aggregated or split up to identify thousands of addresses based on just a few test transactions they performed.
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Related: A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names
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