Study of Blockchain Forensics and Analytics tools

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies have elicited tremendous interest in the recent past due to their ability to enable financial transactions without the need for a central authority. The most appealing aspect of cryptocurrencies that garnered significant attention is its potential to enable (pseudo) anonymous transactions on the blockchain ledger. Unsurprisingly, this has led to rapid adoption of cryptocurrencies for unlawful activities by malicious actors in several ways. Hence, to detect these unlawful activities, it is essential to analyze the blockchain ledgers to derive insights by investigating anonymous transactions and activities, which is where blockchain forensics comes in. In this paper, we present a taxonomy mapping the identified high-level forensics features with the supporting forensics tools that we surveyed. We provide a comparison of the surveyed tools using three practical parameters (number of cryptocurrencies supported, number of features provided and ease of accessing services) and give an overview of their theoretical effectiveness in general with some open challenges identified.