TY - GEN
T1 - Stressing out
T2 - International Workshops on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2016 and 3rd Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research, BITCOIN 2016, 1st Workshop on Advances in Secure Electronic Voting Schemes, VOTING 2016, and 4th Workshop on Encrypted Computing and Applied Homomorphic Cryptography, WAHC 2016
AU - Baqer, Khaled
AU - Huang, Danny Yuxing
AU - McCoy, Damon
AU - Weaver, Nicholas
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by US National Science Foundation grant CNS-1619620.
Publisher Copyright:
© International Financial Cryptography Association 2016.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - In this paper, we present an empirical study of a recent spam campaign (a “stress test”) that resulted in a DoS attack on Bitcoin. The goal of our investigation being to understand the methods spammers used and impact on Bitcoin users. To this end, we used a clustering based method to detect spam transactions. We then validate the clustering results and generate a conservative estimate that 385, 256 (23.41%) out of 1, 645, 667 total transactions were spam during the 10 day period at the peak of the campaign. We show the impact of increasing nonspam transaction fees from 45 to 68 Satoshis/byte (from $0.11 to $0.17 USD per kilobyte of transaction) on average, and increasing delays in processing non-spam transactions from 0.33 to 2.67 h on average, as well as estimate the cost of this spam attack at 201 BTC (or $49, 000 USD). We conclude by pointing out changes that could be made to Bitcoin transaction fees that would mitigate some of the spam techniques used to effectively DoS Bitcoin.
AB - In this paper, we present an empirical study of a recent spam campaign (a “stress test”) that resulted in a DoS attack on Bitcoin. The goal of our investigation being to understand the methods spammers used and impact on Bitcoin users. To this end, we used a clustering based method to detect spam transactions. We then validate the clustering results and generate a conservative estimate that 385, 256 (23.41%) out of 1, 645, 667 total transactions were spam during the 10 day period at the peak of the campaign. We show the impact of increasing nonspam transaction fees from 45 to 68 Satoshis/byte (from $0.11 to $0.17 USD per kilobyte of transaction) on average, and increasing delays in processing non-spam transactions from 0.33 to 2.67 h on average, as well as estimate the cost of this spam attack at 201 BTC (or $49, 000 USD). We conclude by pointing out changes that could be made to Bitcoin transaction fees that would mitigate some of the spam techniques used to effectively DoS Bitcoin.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84988005809&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84988005809&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_1
DO - 10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_1
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84988005809
SN - 9783662533567
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 3
EP - 18
BT - Financial Cryptography and Data Security - International Workshops, FC 2016, BITCOIN, VOTING, and WAHC, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Rohloff, Kurt
A2 - Clark, Jeremy
A2 - Meiklejohn, Sarah
A2 - Wallach, Dan
A2 - Brenner, Michael
A2 - Ryan, Peter Y.A.
PB - Springer Verlag
Y2 - 26 February 2016 through 26 February 2016
ER -