Exploiting Cyber Threats And Protecting Cryptocurrencies Toward Bitcoin Exchanges

Abstract

The concept of Bitcoin first came into creation in 2008, as a response to the Great Financial Crisis, and the world of finances relies upon banks for all kinds of financial transactions as intermediaries. Bitcoin is more than a cryptocurrency used as payment for investors to hold and hope for value; it is considered a digital asset these days. While Bitcoin transactions take place in the cyber network, possibilities are there for cyber-attacks. To protect Bitcoins from illegal miners of Bitcoin data, it is required to find all possible intrusions, called vulnerabilities. If more vulnerabilities exist in the network that makes the transactions vulnerable. As of now, Bitcoin uses centralized Blockchain technology, where the transaction made by the user are managed by various blockchain methods like Merkelroot, Mining, Halving, Keys, and Wallets. These methods provide security to the cryptocurrencies online. Among all the four methods, Wallets are somewhat vulnerable due to their dual services i.e., custodians and non-custodians. Non-custodian Wallet type doesn’t cause vulnerability due to not having any storage for keys. Whereas the Custodian Wallet type provides storage of keys for the customers which makes it as vulnerable. The techniques that lead to vulnerability in the custodian type are hot storage, cold storage, and deep cold storage. The exploitation of all these individual techniques is the main task of this work. When it comes to transactions of bitcoin along the network where the receiver needs to wait around 30 minutes due to mempool. This is also a loophole that may trigger the threat to the bitcoin exchange. These vulnerabilities can be reduced by regulatory oversight and reducing the mempool waiting time or it is possible by maintaining more legal crypto miners for every block of transaction. To verify the whole process of bitcoin transaction exchanges, few cloud services use blockchain technology for processing transactions. The proposed work is to implement the above methods, so that protection is provided to cryptocurrencies toward bitcoin exchanges.