Burning Bitcoins for Censorship Resistance

Abstract

This thesis proposes a new technique to circumvent Internet censorship by using the bitcoin network. It provides a bootstrapping mechanism for existing circumvention tools, that enable access to the restricted information and communication over the Internet, at the cost of “burning” bitcoins. It deploys the concept of public key steganography to hide data in the bitcoin transactions and make them look as legitimate transactions hence, making it impossible for the censor to detect. It aims at designing an efficient cryptographic scheme to store messages in the bitcoin blockchain with a strong focus on space efficiency and implement the scheme to design protocol for steganographic communication.