Exploring Spatial, Temporal, and Logical Attacks on the Bitcoin Network
This work addresses security risks for Bitcoin users and operators by extending prior spatial analysis to include temporal and logical effects, though it appears incremental.
The paper tackles the problem of partitioning attacks on the Bitcoin network by analyzing spatial, temporal, and logical vulnerabilities, revealing centralization in nodes, non-uniform consensus, and software diversity that can be exploited.
In this paper, we explore the partitioning attacks on the Bitcoin network, which is shown to exhibit spatial bias, and temporal and logical diversity. Through data-driven study we highlight: 1) the centralization of Bitcoin nodes across autonomous systems, indicating the possibility of BGP attacks, 2)the non-uniform consensus among nodes, that can be exploited to partition the network, and 3)the diversity in the Bitcoin software usage that can lead to privacy attacks. Atop the prior work, which focused on spatial partitioning, our work extends the analysis of the Bitcoin network to understand the temporal and logical effects on the robustness of the Bitcoin network.