The Experts below are selected from a list of 17979 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Hongki Kim - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Bitcoin Regulation :Legal and Regulatory Issues of the Virtual Currency System
The Korean Journal of Securities Law, 2014Co-Authors: Hongki KimAbstract:Bitcoin is a newly developed type of decentralized digital, crypto currency that has no physical form. It relies on P2P networking and cryptography to maintain its integrity. The main advantages of Bitcoin compare with traditional currencies are low transaction fees, and it anonymity. Although supporters said Bitcoins as the future of world financial markets, it also has numerous defects, in particular with high price volatility, lack of legal security, its immaturity as a currency. In any event, the rapid pace of change in the world of payments means, Bitcoin and other new digital currency will have evolved yet further. It is also important Bitcoin's legal status and the possibility of a government regulation. Some criticize the posibility of facilitating money laundering, tax evasion, and trade in illegal drugs. Another important point is that emerging Bitcoin-denominated instruments rely much less on traditional intermediaries such as bank, insurance company. It affects legal developments of Bitcoin. The purpose of this article is to discuss recent legal developments affecting Bitcoin, based upon their actual use. Part Ⅱ explains how Bitcoin works and used and issued. We review the technical background of Bitcoins and how the system works and describes its system. Part Ⅲ discuss legal background and analysis on the effects of labeling Bitcoins strictly as currency. In this part, we compares Bitcoin to its competition, including money, currency, securities, commodity like gold. Part Ⅳ lays out regulatory concerns expecially foreign regulations such as USA, Japan, Germany. Part Ⅴ provides examples showing why regulation is necessary, including traditional securities and derivatives, new Bitcoin- denominated instruments. Finally, Part Ⅵ concludes by offering some predictions regarding Bitcoin's regulatory future. Although there is a need for regulating virtual currencies, government should be cautious about excessive-regulation.
Pedro Franco - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Understanding Bitcoin: Cryptography, Engineering and Economics
Wiley, 2015Co-Authors: Pedro FrancoAbstract:[http://abneyassociates.org/2013/04/09/understanding-Bitcoin/]\n\t\nBitcoin is a form of Internet money that is immensely trendy and greatly appreciated means of buying and selling on line. And this is a currency that barely anybody understands. Various companies exclusively accept Bitcoins. The truth because of the recent banking instability in Cyprus it became so enormous that the worth of “all outstanding Bitcoins” just hit $1 billion.\nSo what is this Bitcoin? Bitcoin (sign: BTC) is a decentralized digital currency based on an open source, peer-to-peer internet protocol. It was introduced by a pseudonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin)\nBitcoins can be exchanged through a computer or smartphone locally or internationally without an intermediate financial institution. In trade, one Bitcoin is subdivided into 100 million smaller units called satoshis, defined by eight decimal points. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin)\nBitcoin is not managed like typical currencies: it has no central bank or central organization. Instead, it relies on an internet-based peer-to-peer network. The money supply is automated and given to servers or “Bitcoin miners” that confirm Bitcoin transactions as they add them to a decentralized and archived transaction log approximately every 10 minutes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin)\nWho would have thought that a virtual currency with no physical manifestation all of a sudden worth $1 billion in U.S. currency.\nBitcoin is gaining traction plus attention even if it does not hold a candle to the $1.13 trillion in Federal Reserve Notes in circulation.\nWhat people like about Bitcoin is it removes the middleman from online transfers of money. We are all concern about those middlemen such as central banks, or the Federal Reserve or credit card companies. Bitcoin also permits for more anonymity than every other mode of online payment. Though it’s hard to pinpoint just how unidentified Bitcoin really is, this fact manipulates how the currency is used. One controversial Reddit group that seeks to “protect” men from feminists asks for donations in Bitcoin particularly to guard the characters of all involved, although some secretive purchases made online using Bitcoin are justified,.\nTwo main ways to acquire Bitcoins: You can buy them or mine for them, don’t go back you red it right, you can mine it. Just like any other type of money the Bitcoins and U.S. dollars exchange rate also fluctuates. The current exchange rate as of Friday afternoon is 1 Bitcoin to $88.811. Similar with conventional currencies, it’s possible to make money just by buying and selling Bitcoins as exchange rates change.\nIt’s a outlandish procedure as for mining for Bitcoins. According to Bitcoin’s official website, mining is basically making your computer run a program to “do mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network to confirm transactions and increase security.”\nYour chances of receiving any Bitcoins from mining on your own are thin, other than mining takes up a lot of space on your computer. A lot of people adhere what are known as mining pools to compensate. People can combine their computing power to crack the codes together, splitting the Bitcoin profits among themselves in a pool. And this is the primer of Bitcoin.\n\t\n
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Understanding Bitcoin
Al Jazeera, 2012Co-Authors: Silas Barta, Pedro Franco, Robert MurphyAbstract:[http://abneyassociates.org/2013/04/09/understanding-Bitcoin/]\n\t\nBitcoin is a form of Internet money that is immensely trendy and greatly appreciated means of buying and selling on line. And this is a currency that barely anybody understands. Various companies exclusively accept Bitcoins. The truth because of the recent banking instability in Cyprus it became so enormous that the worth of “all outstanding Bitcoins” just hit $1 billion.\nSo what is this Bitcoin? Bitcoin (sign: BTC) is a decentralized digital currency based on an open source, peer-to-peer internet protocol. It was introduced by a pseudonymous developer named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin)\nBitcoins can be exchanged through a computer or smartphone locally or internationally without an intermediate financial institution. In trade, one Bitcoin is subdivided into 100 million smaller units called satoshis, defined by eight decimal points. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin)\nBitcoin is not managed like typical currencies: it has no central bank or central organization. Instead, it relies on an internet-based peer-to-peer network. The money supply is automated and given to servers or “Bitcoin miners” that confirm Bitcoin transactions as they add them to a decentralized and archived transaction log approximately every 10 minutes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin)\nWho would have thought that a virtual currency with no physical manifestation all of a sudden worth $1 billion in U.S. currency.\nBitcoin is gaining traction plus attention even if it does not hold a candle to the $1.13 trillion in Federal Reserve Notes in circulation.\nWhat people like about Bitcoin is it removes the middleman from online transfers of money. We are all concern about those middlemen such as central banks, or the Federal Reserve or credit card companies. Bitcoin also permits for more anonymity than every other mode of online payment. Though it’s hard to pinpoint just how unidentified Bitcoin really is, this fact manipulates how the currency is used. One controversial Reddit group that seeks to “protect” men from feminists asks for donations in Bitcoin particularly to guard the characters of all involved, although some secretive purchases made online using Bitcoin are justified,.\nTwo main ways to acquire Bitcoins: You can buy them or mine for them, don’t go back you red it right, you can mine it. Just like any other type of money the Bitcoins and U.S. dollars exchange rate also fluctuates. The current exchange rate as of Friday afternoon is 1 Bitcoin to $88.811. Similar with conventional currencies, it’s possible to make money just by buying and selling Bitcoins as exchange rates change.\nIt’s a outlandish procedure as for mining for Bitcoins. According to Bitcoin’s official website, mining is basically making your computer run a program to “do mathematical calculations for the Bitcoin network to confirm transactions and increase security.”\nYour chances of receiving any Bitcoins from mining on your own are thin, other than mining takes up a lot of space on your computer. A lot of people adhere what are known as mining pools to compensate. People can combine their computing power to crack the codes together, splitting the Bitcoin profits among themselves in a pool. And this is the primer of Bitcoin.\n\t\n
Damon Mccoy - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Tracking Ransomware End-to-end
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2018Co-Authors: Danny Yuxing Huang, Maxwell Matthaios Aliapoulios, Vector Guo Li, Kylie Mcroberts, Kirill Levchenko, Alex C. Snoeren, Luca Invernizzi, Jonathan Levin, Elie Bursztein, Damon MccoyAbstract:Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts the files of infected hosts and demands payment, often in a crypto-currency like Bitcoin. In this paper, we create a measurement framework that we use to perform a large-scale, two-year, end-to-end measurement of ransomware payments, victims, and operators. By combining an array of data sources, including ransomware binaries, seed ransom payments, victim telemetry from infections, and a large database of Bitcoin addresses annotated with their owners, we sketch the outlines of this burgeoning ecosystem and associated third-party infrastructure. In particular, we are able to trace the financial transactions, from the acquisition of Bitcoins by victims, through the payment of ransoms, to the cash out of Bitcoins by the ransomware operators. We find that many ransomware operators cashed out using BTC-e, a now-defunct Bitcoin exchange. In total we are able to track over $16 million USD in likely ransom payments made by 19,750 potential victims during a two-year period. While our study focuses on ransomware, our methods are potentially applicable to other cybercriminal operations that have similarly adopted Bitcoin as their payment channel.
Srdjan Capkun - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Double-spending fast payments in Bitcoin
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security - CCS '12, 2012Co-Authors: Ghassan O. Karame, Elli Androulaki, Srdjan CapkunAbstract:Bitcoin is a decentralized payment system that relies on Proof-of-Work (PoW) to verify payments. Nowadays, Bitcoin is increasingly used in a number of fast payment scenarios, where the time between the exchange of currency and goods is short (in the order of few seconds). While the Bitcoin payment verification scheme is designed to prevent double-spending, our results show that the system requires tens of minutes to verify a transaction and is therefore inappropriate for fast payments. An example of this use of Bitcoin was recently reported in the media: Bitcoins were used as a form of \emph{fast} payment in a local fast-food restaurant. Until now, the security of fast Bitcoin payments has not been studied. In this paper, we analyze the security of using Bitcoin for fast payments. We show that, unless appropriate detection techniques are integrated in the current Bitcoin implementation, double-spending attacks on fast payments succeed with overwhelming probability and can be mounted at low cost. We further show that the measures recommended by Bitcoin developers for the use of Bitcoin in fast payments are not always effective in detecting double-spending; we show that if those recommendations are integrated in future Bitcoin implementations, double-spending attacks on Bitcoin will still be possible. Finally, we propose and implement a modification to the existing Bitcoin implementation that ensures the detection of double-spending attacks against fast payments.
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two Bitcoins at the price of one double spending attacks on fast payments in Bitcoin
IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch., 2012Co-Authors: Ghassan O. Karame, Elli Androulaki, Srdjan CapkunAbstract:Bitcoin is a decentralized payment system that is based on Proof-of-Work. Bitcoin is currently gaining popularity as a digital currency; several businesses are starting to accept Bitcoin transactions. An example case of the growing use of Bitcoin was recently reported in the media; here, Bitcoins were used as a form of fast payment in a local fast-food restaurant. In this paper, we analyze the security of using Bitcoin for fast payments, where the time between the exchange of currency and goods is short (i.e., in the order of few seconds). We focus on doublespending attacks on fast payments and demonstrate that these attacks can be mounted at low cost on currently deployed versions of Bitcoin. We further show that the measures recommended by Bitcoin developers for the use of Bitcoin in fast transactions are not always effective in resisting double-spending; we show that if those recommendations are integrated in future Bitcoin implementations, double-spending attacks on Bitcoin will still be possible. Finally, we leverage on our findings and propose a lightweight countermeasure that enables the detection of doublespending attacks in fast transactions.
Nhien-an Le-khac - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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An Automated Live Forensic and Postmortem Analysis Tool for Bitcoin on Windows Systems
IEEE Access, 2019Co-Authors: Stephan Zollner, Kim-kwang Raymond Choo, Nhien-an Le-khacAbstract:Bitcoin is popular not only with consumers, but also with cybercriminals (e.g., in ransomware and online extortion, and commercial online child exploitation). Given the potential of Bitcoin to be involved in a criminal investigation, the need to have an up-to-date and in-depth understanding on the forensic acquisition and analysis of Bitcoins is crucial. However, there has been limited forensic research of Bitcoin in the literature. The general focus of existing research is on postmortem analysis of specific locations (e.g. wallets on mobile devices), rather than a forensic approach that combines live data forensics and postmortem analysis to facilitate the identification, acquisition, and analysis of forensic traces relating to the use of Bitcoins on a system. Hence, the latter is the focus of this paper where we present an open source tool for live forensic and postmortem analysing automatically. Using this open source tool, we describe a list of target artifacts that can be obtained from a forensic investigation of popular Bitcoin clients and Web Wallets on different web browsers installed on Windows 7 and Windows 10 platforms.
