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Double-spending fast payments in bitcoin

Published: 16 October 2012 Publication History

Abstract

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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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CCS '12: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Computer and communications security
    October 2012
    1088 pages
    ISBN:9781450316514
    DOI:10.1145/2382196
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 16 October 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. bitcoin
    2. countermeasures
    3. double-spending
    4. fast payments

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    CCS'12: the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
    October 16 - 18, 2012
    North Carolina, Raleigh, USA

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    View all
    • (2024)DiFastBit: Transaction Differentiation Scheme to Avoid Double-Spending for Fast Bitcoin PaymentsMathematics10.3390/math1216248412:16(2484)Online publication date: 11-Aug-2024
    • (2024)A Review on Blockchain Technology, Current Challenges, and AI-Driven SolutionsACM Computing Surveys10.1145/370064157:3(1-39)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2024
    • (2024)SPRING: Improving the Throughput of Sharding Blockchain via Deep Reinforcement Learning Based State PlacementProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645386(2836-2846)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2024)Review on Security Concerns in Blockchain and it's Counter Measures2024 Second International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ICETITE)10.1109/ic-ETITE58242.2024.10493732(1-10)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Review on Security Concerns in Blockchain and it's Countermeasures2024 Second International Conference on Emerging Trends in Information Technology and Engineering (ICETITE)10.1109/ic-ETITE58242.2024.10493705(1-10)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2024
    • (2024)Phantasm: Adaptive Scalable Mining Toward Stable BlockDAGIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2023.332220317:3(1084-1096)Online publication date: May-2024
    • (2024)On Off-Chaining Smart Contract Runtime Protection: A Queuing Model ApproachIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2024.338915335:8(1345-1359)Online publication date: Aug-2024
    • (2024)Estuary: A Low Cross-Shard Blockchain Sharding Protocol Based on State SplittingIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2024.335163235:3(405-420)Online publication date: Mar-2024
    • (2024) LNGate 2 : Secure Bidirectional IoT Micro-Payments Using Bitcoin's Lightning Network and Threshold Cryptography IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2023.3317704(1-17)Online publication date: 2024
    • (2024)Communications Security in Industry X: A SurveyIEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society10.1109/OJCOMS.2024.33560765(982-1025)Online publication date: 2024
    • Show More Cited By

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