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Chinese Researchers Propose Tor-Inspired Overhaul of Bitcoin

Posted by timothy on from the will-tax-authorities-squirm? dept.

Patrick O'Neill writes: Although Bitcoin was never designed to be anonymous, many of its users have used it as if it were. Now, two prominent Chinese researchers are proposing a system that encrypts all new Bitcoin transactions layer by layer to beat network analysis that can unmask Bitcoin users. The new research is inspired by the Tor anonymity network. The researchers' paper is at arXiv. (Also covered by The Stack.)

46 comments

  1. Arxiv paper looks good,at first sight by vikingpower · · Score: 1, Troll

    It was, however, written by an unknown Chinese author. How much of the paper is truly original, and how much of it was copy-pasted or downright stolen, remains to be seen.

    --
    Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    1. Re:Arxiv paper looks good,at first sight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Touche, it remains to be how much of content of your comment is truly original, and how much of it was copy-pasted or downright stolen.

    2. Re:Arxiv paper looks good,at first sight by vikingpower · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Of your comment, at least, 23/25th ( by word count) or a whopping 92% were copy-pasted or downright stolen.

      --
      Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    3. Re:Arxiv paper looks good,at first sight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Wasn't "Satoshi Nakamoto" an unknown author before publishing "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"?

      Or am I missing a joke?

    4. Re:Arxiv paper looks good,at first sight by vikingpower · · Score: 1

      You're right. I may have been a bit overbearing, there. In which case: apologies.

      --
      Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    5. Re:Arxiv paper looks good,at first sight by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh look a supremacist Viking assuming that Chinese only steal and don't produce anything. How original.

    6. Re:Arxiv paper looks good,at first sight by morgauxo · · Score: 1

      And it is better for it. Want to know my bet on previous your comment? The idea was 100% stolen, on the number of words, my bet is atleast 50%.
      abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

    7. Re:Arxiv paper looks good,at first sight by blazer1024 · · Score: 1

      Hey... all of those letters you've used here have been used before. 100% unoriginal.

    8. Re:Arxiv paper looks good,at first sight by gweihir · · Score: 1

      And that would work how? Apparently, you have no idea how scientific publishing works. Faked results are a real possibility, but stealing is actually quite hard.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  2. Tor Is Not Anonymous by sexconker · · Score: 0

    Every exit node is suspect. Tor is not anonymous.
    If your traffic gets to its intended destination and back to you over public links then there's no fucking anonymity, just obscurity.

    1. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Neither are you when you forget to check "Anonymous" while trolling. Anonymity is for cows anyway....you cow. Moooooooooooo.

    2. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 2

      Tor is not anonymous

      Anonymity is an illusion. Given enough resources, everything you do is traceable, back to you.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    3. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Anonymity is an illusion. Given enough resources, everything you do is traceable, back to you.

      (Emphasis added)

      Quantum Physics says no.

    4. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by Kjella · · Score: 1

      As long as you use HTTPS and don't get MITM'd by false certificates or use some other secure protocol, the exit node is not the worry. That security is as good as SSH or any other crypto. It's that an adversary with enough resources can do correlation/traffic analysis or even just be the whole chain from start to finish.

      If your traffic gets to its intended destination and back to you over public links then there's no fucking anonymity, just obscurity.

      If your traffic gets to its intended destination and back to you over private links then there's no fucking anonymity, just obscurity. Because if you're the NSA there's no "private".

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by countach · · Score: 1

      I'm guessing you mean on the internet, because that surely doesn't apply in real life!

      On the internet, your statement isn't true either. I suppose you could say that given enough resources anything you do *might* be traced to you. Whether it actually could be depends on a lot of things like what logs various systems keep, whether you repeatedly engage in the same behaviour, and what exactly you mean by "enough resources". Like does managing impossible feats like controlling foreign hostile computers constitute "resources"?

    6. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by countach · · Score: 1

      "Because if you're the NSA there's no "private"."

      Depends what country you're in and/or what countries the links pass over. The NSA doesn't (quite!) control the whole internet.

    7. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      (of a person) not identified by name; of unknown name.

      Given enough resources, you can name anyone who does anything. Anonymity is only as good as the lack of resources allows. Therefore it is an illusion. It may be a practical illusion for many things, but it is still illusion. Same with Privacy.

      I am fully aware that my actions are likely being monitored, at least partially, and that I am a known individual for enough things that my actions are neither private nor hidden (anonymous) for most things.

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    8. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by sexconker · · Score: 1

      I don't post as AC when trolling, and I haven't done the cow thing in a long time because I got bored of it.
      I've always posted it under my own name.

    9. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by sexconker · · Score: 1

      HTTPS doesn't hide the fact that you're making a connection from host A to host B.
      People think tor does that, but it doesn't (and it can't).

      That's what anonymity is about. Encryption of the actual traffic is a separate issue (and cert based encryption is absolutely not secure, even with PFS - the governments of the world and the "trusted" root authorities are absolutely untrustworthy).

    10. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I suppose you decided to moo again out of nostalgia?

    11. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 1

      Let me know when you can operate at the quantum level. Mkay?

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
    12. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually they do. When those fishing boats "accidentally" dropped anchor and tore up underwater cables, the NSA was down there with submarines patching.

    13. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by gweihir · · Score: 1

      And if you had the fist idea what you are talking about, you would not make such bogus statements.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    14. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by gweihir · · Score: 1

      Anonymity is quite real, you just need to make tacking harder than the enemy can afford to do.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    15. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by cheater512 · · Score: 1

      Only really if the data exiting the exit node is unencrypted.

      If it goes over HTTPS then all the exit knows is someone tried to access a website on a specific IP.
      If that IP is say a Google IP then all you know is someone on Tor wants to use Google which gives you nothing.

    16. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by countach · · Score: 1

      "NSA was down there with submarines patching."

      If you say so. They can't patch every link though.

    17. Re:Tor Is Not Anonymous by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      So untraceable internet transaction, I wonder how long it will be before three letter investigatory agencies start offering free stays in their resort facilities, where entrance is not voluntary and you stay as long as they want you to. You can imagine all sorts of stuff going on offer and all sorts of services being advertised, buy at your peril (pushing the bounds of entrapment but not so much if they use an informant middle person even when they are on commission). Using the currency pretty much puts a bullseye on you for investigatory agencies. Only reason it is still going is 'Spies 'r' U.S.' are hoping to use it to a greater degree for their criminal enterprises.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  3. Translation of this headline: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "Chinese researchers devise method by which clandestine Chinese intelligence operations may be funded"

  4. What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Although Bitcoin was never designed to be anonymous, many of its users have used it as if it were."

    Come again? Wasn't that the whole draw to BTC in the first place?

    1. Re:What? by sherr · · Score: 2

      Yes and no. It's about as private as an email address. Everyone can always see which email address send a message (or which account purchased something with which bitcoin), but it's not easily traceable back to a real person. Then again if you're actually buying physical things with bitcoin then you probably had to supply a shipping address, so that's pretty easily traceable right there. Or they'd have to trace your internet traffic back to your computer. If they really want to find you they can.

      The big draws to bitcoin were that:
      1) It's not controlled by a government (so they can't intentionally inflate it)
      2) your 'account' is not controlled by a third party (like a bank) which makes it harder for governments to shut down illegal activities because instead of simply requiring that the banks freeze all payments to $website they actually have to track down and shut off the physical servers in question (and for the more paranoid, it's also impossible for the government to simply freeze / steal your money, a la Cyprus)
      3) there are no chargebacks, a spent bitcoin stays spent, so you can't buy something, wait for it to be shipped, and then dispute the charge like you can for credit cards (making bitcoins safer for merchants)
      4) bitcoin transactions don't require any secret information (like for example your credit card number), making them safer for customers because you don't have to worry about identity theft
      5) nerds liked that you could mine it using your spare cpu cycles and make real money out of nothing more than electricity (not true anymore, the market's been flooded with mining rigs and you are extremely unlikely to make more bitcoin than you're paying in electricity unless you get free electricity).

    2. Re:What? by GameboyRMH · · Score: 1

      Nope it wasn't designed to be anonymous, it was designed to be uncontrollable and impossible to "counterfeit." Every account's history is fully traceable. Any anonymity has to be between you and the account.

      --
      "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
    3. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sometimes I wonder if BitCoin was designed by some LEO just to watch people have enough rope to hang themselves. Given that transactions are public, cryptographically secure, and are forever in the ledger, all it takes is just watching wallets and what goes in and out. Once a LEO has proof that Alice owns a certain wallet, she is linked to all the ingoing and outgoing transactions, as well as the wallets that those are connected to. Bob also has a wallet and there is proof that Bob owns that wallet. Even though there are a few layers between Alice and Bob, it isn't hard for someone to link the wallets in between, and once this is done, any jury will convict.

      So, when someone buys Prozium from some guy on a black market, the seller gets busted, the LEO can just show that wallet "A" belongs to the seller, "B" to the buyer, and the transactions are in the blockchain.

      Yes, you can try obfuscating BitCoins with tumbling... but as with obfuscated code, it only delays. It may take a bit, but a party can figure out over time which coins belong to which wallet. Of course, multiple people can own one wallet, but as Mt. Gox and other gone exchanges have shown, if you hand your BitCoins over to someone else, you are pretty likely to never get them back.

      The only feasible way to move coins anonymously is to create an offline wallet, stuff coins in that, and hand that to another party via physical means. Of course, there is the trust issue since the coins in that wallet can easily be double-spent, boning the recipient.

      tl;dr, with absolute tracings of transactions, the ease of tacking a wallet to an individual, BitCoin is a dream for law enforcement... why do fishing expeditions when you can just parse the blockchain and arrest everyone who owns a wallet where a certain tainted coin passed through?

    4. Re:What? by gweihir · · Score: 1

      No. Bitcoin was never designed to be anonymous. It is sort-of pseudonymous only, but even that is mostly history.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    5. Re:What? by gweihir · · Score: 2

      One should add that nobody that bothered to find out was ever in doubt about the lack of anonymity. People just assumed it was anonymous without good reason.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    6. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's psuedonymous, each wallet is uniquely identified and all transactions are publicly recorded. All you need to get a wallet is to run one on the several availiable bitcoin client software programs. No need to link it to your real ID (though it's possible to do so via side channels)

    7. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bitcoins are not individually tracked, you have to actually walk the transaction chain where each transaction can have multiple inputs and outputs. Transaction don't need to be A to B. You can set up so "A and B" (purchase) and "C to B" (purchase) and "E to D" (change) and "E to A" (change) and "A to C" (change) and "A to D" (purchase). Likewise with a tumbler you can't see coins travel through and back to a wallet, you see 20 wallets with .25 BTC inputs and 20 different wallets with .25BTC outputs. The are also wallets that can generate new receive addresses for each transaction. This isn't merely a delay but generates genuine uncertainty as to the movement of specific funds.

  5. Can you have a Blockchain and be anonymous ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I thought with BitCoin everyone has to know how much is in any of the wallets so that people cannot double spend. How can you be anonymous then ? Say IllegalOrganization publishes its address to get donations. So I send a BitCoin, but NSA or somebody else figures out my BC address, so now there's proof that I donated to IllegalOrganization.

    1. Re:Can you have a Blockchain and be anonymous ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It can be anonymous if you obtain and use a wallet anonymously. You can also obscure your wallet transactions via laundering techniques. Still, one botched interaction and you're done.

  6. Tulips by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Were all the rage in the not too distant past. The prices were much high. Then the fad ended. Bitcoins is the tulips of the 22nd century.

    1. Re: Tulips by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Groundbreaking.

  7. bit coin by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Tax dodge when flat tax takes hold.
    You cant have a no IRS flat tax unless religion is subjected to it also.
    No person place or thing should avoid the flat tax.

    But just a pipe dream no worries it will ever happen your loop holes and deductions are all safe.

  8. What's the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It you have a private key
    To transfer money to you, make a public key from your private, and have the person sending you the money include the public key in the signed transaction.
    When you wish to pass the money on, you just have to sign the transaction in a manner that can only be done with your private key.

    The private key is your wallet.
    You can have as many as you wish.
    You just have to hold it while you hold ownership of the bit of money.

    The public blockchains are just a record of the transactions signed by the folks involved.
    You could use TOR to further ofuscate things,but that does not seem a fundamental part of the transfer system.

    So I wonder how bitcoin works. Perhaps I should read TFA?

  9. Let's cram some more buzzwords in there! by rebelwarlock · · Score: 1

    If Uber were to adopt a Beowulf cluster of Raspberry Pi mining nodes with TOR encryption on the blockchain, while Elon Musk sat in a self driving car that he hacked with a garage door opener, you might have my attention.

  10. XMR by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    bitcoin will never be anonymous, it is time to move to Monero.