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Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
}
TY - GEN
T1 - Uncontrolled Randomness in Blockchains
T2 - Covert Bulletin Board for Illicit Activity
AU - Al-Salami, Nasser
AU - Zhang, Bingsheng
N1 - ©2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
PY - 2020/10/6
Y1 - 2020/10/6
N2 - Public blockchains can be abused to covertly store and disseminate potentially harmful digital content which poses a serious regulatory issue. In this work, we show the severity of the problem by demonstrating that blockchains can be exploited to surreptitiously distribute arbitrary content. More specifically, all major blockchain systems use randomized cryptographic primitives, such as digital signatures and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs; we illustrate how the uncontrolled randomness in such primitives can be maliciously manipulated to enable covert communication and hidden persistent storage. To clarify the potential risk, we design, implement and evaluate our technique against the widely-used ECDSA signature scheme, the CryptoNote's ring signature scheme, and Monero's ring confidential transactions. Importantly, the significance of the demonstrated attacks stems from their undetectability, their adverse effect on the future of decentralized blockchains, and their serious repercussions on users' privacy and crypto funds. Finally, we present a generic framework to immunize blockchains against these attacks.
AB - Public blockchains can be abused to covertly store and disseminate potentially harmful digital content which poses a serious regulatory issue. In this work, we show the severity of the problem by demonstrating that blockchains can be exploited to surreptitiously distribute arbitrary content. More specifically, all major blockchain systems use randomized cryptographic primitives, such as digital signatures and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs; we illustrate how the uncontrolled randomness in such primitives can be maliciously manipulated to enable covert communication and hidden persistent storage. To clarify the potential risk, we design, implement and evaluate our technique against the widely-used ECDSA signature scheme, the CryptoNote's ring signature scheme, and Monero's ring confidential transactions. Importantly, the significance of the demonstrated attacks stems from their undetectability, their adverse effect on the future of decentralized blockchains, and their serious repercussions on users' privacy and crypto funds. Finally, we present a generic framework to immunize blockchains against these attacks.
U2 - 10.1109/IWQoS49365.2020.9213064
DO - 10.1109/IWQoS49365.2020.9213064
M3 - Conference contribution/Paper
SN - 9781728168883
BT - 2020 IEEE/ACM 28th International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)
PB - IEEE
ER -