Using ethereum transactions to deanonymize senders

Abstract

The historic rise of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies to over $327 billion in market capitalization has sparked significant research efforts studying their reliability, performance, and security. Bitcoin, the highest valued cryptocurrency, has received the most thorough scrutiny, with many studies analyzing its peer properties and network health. In contrast, the network layer for Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, has gone mostly ignored, even though it employs different algorithms for transaction propagation. \n\nIn this thesis, we perform timing analysis on transactions propagated through Ethereum networks to identify the origin nodes. We build a tool called TxSniper to verify our approach on Ethereum's main network. We find that we can identify the origin with a 70% probability; this method is not always effective due to presence of nodes running clients that use different implementations of transaction propagation.