Abstract
Bitcoin has emerged as a popular crypto currency. It was introduced in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto (A pseudonym). The reasons for its popularity include its decentralized nature, double spending prevention, smart strategy to counter inflation and providing a certain degree of anonymity. In February 2014, Bitcoin community was shocked to know that a Japan based company named Mt. Gox who, were dealing 70 percent of Bitcoin transactions that time, announced that they were hit by a bug in the Bitcoin protocol named as Transaction Malleability. The company lost hundreds of millions of dollars worth bitcoin. Soon after this, another company SilkRoad 2 also claimed to have affected by same issue. To date there is little research literature available on this recent issue and it is hard to grasp this problem. The purpose of writing this paper is twofold. We discuss Transaction Malleability in detail with respect to the structure of Bitcoin transactions in order to make reader properly understands what Transaction Malleability is and how it works. We also propose a mechanism to counter this issue.
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Notes
- 1.
Many theories have been presented but none has been proved to be correct.
- 2.
CoinDesk is a famous Bitcoin trading website (www.coindesk.com).
- 3.
In fact it is not simply the hash, but the results of a series of steps performed on public ECDSA key to get the private key. For a demonstration please visit www.gobittest.appspot.com/Address.
References
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Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy, hit with lawsuit. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/28/us-bitcoin-mtgox-bankruptcy-idUSBREA1R0FX20140228
Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy, hit with lawsuit. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-0-hacked-using-bitcoin-bug-all-its-funds-stolen/
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Rajput, U., Abbas, F., Hussain, R., Eun, H., Oh, H. (2015). A Simple Yet Efficient Approach to Combat Transaction Malleability in Bitcoin. In: Rhee, KH., Yi, J. (eds) Information Security Applications. WISA 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8909. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15087-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15087-1_3
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