Abstract
Due to the unique characteristics of blockchain, such as decentralization, anonymity, high credibility, and nontampering, blockchain technologies have become an integral part of public data platforms and public infrastructure. The communication between the stakeholders of a given blockchain can be used as a carrier for covert communication under cover of legal transactions, which has become a promising research direction of blockchain technology. Due to the special mechanism of blockchain, some traditional blockchain covert communication schemes are not mature enough. They suffer from various drawbacks, such as weak concealment of secret information, cumbersome identification and screening of special transactions, poor availability, and low comprehensive performance. Therefore, this paper designs a scheme of covert communication in the Bitcoin blockchain, which takes normal transactions as a mask and leverages the Bitcoin transaction mechanism to embed secret information in the public key hash field. Specifically, we propose a novel key update mechanism combined with the hash algorithm to construct a covert channel. It ensures security and can update the channel to prevent the related problems caused by address reuse. We are taking advantage of the feature of Bitcoin that cannot be double-spent to solve the problem of burning bitcoin when paying bitcoin to a fake public key hash. In our scheme, both parties to the communication are anonymous, and the attacker cannot detect the covert data or track the transaction and address. Our proposed scheme was tested in real Bitcoin blockchain network, and the experimental results were analyzed to verify its security, availability, and efficiency.
Highlights
Since Lampson [1] first put forward the concept of covert communication in 1973, covert communication technology has made considerable progress
Erefore, we design a new covert communication scheme based on the Bitcoin transaction mechanism, which uses Bitcoin public key hash to hide secret information. e scheme uses keys to ensure the security of secret information, establishes a covert channel between the receiver and the sender, uses the hash algorithm to realize the dynamic update of the address while realizing the identification of special transactions, which ensures the security of the covert channel and avoids a series of risk problems caused by address reuse
Work is paper proposes a covert communication scheme based on the bitcoin transaction mechanism, which uses a symmetric key to ensure the security and concealment of secret information. e private key is used to ensure that the receiver can quickly and accurately identify a special transaction that contains secret information
Summary
Since Lampson [1] first put forward the concept of covert communication in 1973, covert communication technology has made considerable progress. Erefore, we design a new covert communication scheme based on the Bitcoin transaction mechanism, which uses Bitcoin public key hash to hide secret information. E scheme uses keys to ensure the security of secret information, establishes a covert channel between the receiver and the sender, uses the hash algorithm to realize the dynamic update of the address while realizing the identification of special transactions, which ensures the security of the covert channel and avoids a series of risk problems caused by address reuse. (2) We improved the information embedding method based on the Pay-To-Fake-Public-Key-Hash (P2FPKH) in the Bitcoin blockchain, ensured the concealment of secret information through encryption algorithms, and formulated the rules for embedding information. (5) We designed a complete covert communication scheme based on the bitcoin transaction mechanism through induction and the proposed method, conducted experiments on the real Bitcoin network, and analyzed the experimental results
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