Computer scientific discipline Ph.D. pupil Sarah Meiklejohn (pictured) is causing a major stir inward the earth of cryto-currency in addition to dark marketplace transactions.
She’s business office of a squad at UC San Diego in addition to George Mason University investigating the Bitcoin marketplace in addition to cybercrime. Meiklejohn has larn an goodness on tracking Bitcoin transactions which, on the surface, seem to hold upward anonymous. But the squad constitute a means to link transactions to Bitcoin merchants in addition to services – potentially undermining i major work of Bitcoin: funding online purchases of illegal products.
In July, Meiklejohn helped cybercrime goodness Brian Krebs verify that users had deposited a full of 2 bitcoins ( $200) into a handbag on the Silk Road dark marketplace to purchase heroin that would hold upward sent to Krebs’ home. (Krebs was able to warning the police pull earlier the heroin arrived at his home.)
More recently, a columnist at Forbes magazine asked Meiklejohn to encounter if she could draw an lodge for pocket-size amounts of marijuana from iii unlike Bitcoin-based online dark markets. Meiklejohn followed “digital breadcrumbs” on Silk Road in addition to had trivial problem tracing the drug buys dorsum to the Forbes author using a clustering analysis in addition to detecting a specific betoken inward Bitcoin’s blockchain tape of transactions – linking the user to the drug buy. The Forbes columnist, Andy Greenberg, quotes Meiklejohn every bit saying
There “are ways of using Bitcoin privately. But if you’re a casual Bitcoin user, you’re in all likelihood non hiding your activity real well.”
Not surprisingly, the findings accept striking paydirt on Slashdot, and Bloomberg Businessweek noted that a novel newspaper past times Meiklejohn in addition to her colleagues “argues that the network’s increased reliance on a few large accounts makes user identities less secure.”
That paper, “A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men amongst No Names,” volition hold upward presented at ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Barcelona Oct. 24, simply an advance version is instantly available.
Meiklejohn’s co-authors at UC San Diego include undergraduate Marjori Pomarole, grad pupil Grant Jordan, Center for Networked Systems interrogation scientist (and Jacobs SChool alum) Kirill Levchenko, onetime figurer scientific discipline postdoc Damon McCoy (now educational activity at George Mason), too every bit figurer scientific discipline professors Geoff Voelker in addition to Stefan Savage.
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