Probing the Mystery of Cryptocurrency Theft: An Investigation into Methods for Taint Analysis
It addresses the challenge of evaluating transaction tracking methods for cryptocurrency theft, which is incremental as it builds on existing tainting techniques.
This paper tackles the problem of tracking cryptocurrency theft by introducing two new tainting methods and an address profiling approach with a metrics-based evaluation framework, comparing their accuracy with previous techniques using real Bitcoin theft data.
Since the creation of Bitcoin, transaction tracking is one of the prominent means for following the movement of Bitcoins involved in illegal activities. Although every Bitcoin transaction is recorded in the blockchain database, which is transparent for anyone to observe and analyse, Bitcoin's pseudonymity system and transaction obscuring techniques still allow criminals to disguise their transaction trail. While there have been a few attempts to develop tracking methods, there is no accepted evaluation method to measure their accuracy. Therefore, this paper investigates strategies for transaction tracking by introducing two new tainting methods, and proposes an address profiling approach with a metrics-based evaluation framework. We use our approach and framework to compare the accuracy of our new tainting methods with the previous tainting techniques, using data from two real Bitcoin theft transactions and several related control transactions.