Invited Talk: Dandelion: Privacy-Preserving Transaction Forwarding in Bitcoin's Peer-to-Peer Network
Recently, researchers have demonstrated deanonymization attacks that exploit weaknesses in the Bitcoin network’s peer-to-peer (P2P) networking protocols. In particular, the P2P network currently forwards content in a structured way that allows observers to link users' Bitcoin addresses to their IP addresses. We have proposed a simple networking policy called Dandelion, which changes the network gossip protocol in an attempt to mitigate such attacks. Dandelion achieves nearly-optimal anonymity guarantees at minimal cost to the network’s utility. This talk will discuss the algorithm, theoretical guarantees, and tradeoffs in Dandelion's design space. We will also discuss preliminary efforts to build a reference implementation.