Abstract
Steganography is one of the ways to hide data between parties. Its use can be worrisome, e.g., to hide illegal communications. Researchers found that public blockchains can be an attractive place to hide communications; however, there is not much evidence of actual use in blockchains. Besides, previous work showed a lack of steganalysis methods for blockchains. In this context, we present a steganalysis approach for blockchains, evaluating it in Bitcoin and Ethereum, both popular cryptocurrencies. The main objective is to answer if one can find steganography in real case scenarios, focusing on LSB of addresses and nonces. Our sequential analysis included 253 GiB and 107 GiB of bitcoin and ethereum, respectively. We also analyzed up to 98 million bitcoin clusters. We found that bitcoin clusters could carry up to 360 KiB of hidden data if used for such a purpose. We have not found any concrete evidence of hidden data in the blockchains. The sequential analysis may not capture the perspective of the users of the blockchain network. In this case, we recommend clustering analysis, but it depends on the clustering method’s accuracy. Steganalysis is an essential aspect of blockchain security.
Highlights
The use of blockchains in the infrastructure of online services is currently trending.Financial services were the kick start after 2008, propelled by the Bitcoin cryptocurrency [1], but other services are beginning to explore the benefits of blockchains
Etherclust [57] could be used for ethereum, but it restricts the analysis to tokens of the ethereum network; thereby, we focused on bitcoin in the second experiment
We present the sequential analysis first, considering block nonces (Section 4.1.1) and LSB of addresses (Section 4.1.2) of bitcoin and ethereum blockchains
Summary
Financial services were the kick start after 2008, propelled by the Bitcoin cryptocurrency [1], but other services are beginning to explore the benefits of blockchains. It seems that society had a demand for strong integrity and decentralized availability of data, where the blockchain fits today as a promising solution. Blocks of data are linked together in a chain, where the valid chain is the one that the majority of participants have an agreement [11] It combines linking the data with cryptography services, and this combination provides a robust infrastructure for applications. One can store a cryptographic digest of a given electronic document in a blockchain
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