Computer Science > Cryptography and Security
[Submitted on 1 Jun 2022 (v1), last revised 18 Oct 2022 (this version, v2)]
Title:Watch Your Back: Identifying Cybercrime Financial Relationships in Bitcoin through Back-and-Forth Exploration
View PDFAbstract:Cybercriminals often leverage Bitcoin for their illicit activities. In this work, we propose back-and-forth exploration, a novel automated Bitcoin transaction tracing technique to identify cybercrime financial relationships. Given seed addresses belonging to a cybercrime campaign, it outputs a transaction graph, and identifies paths corresponding to relationships between the campaign under study and external services and other cybercrime campaigns. Back-and-forth exploration provides two key contributions. First, it explores both forward and backwards, instead of only forward as done by prior work, enabling the discovery of relationships that cannot be found by only exploring forward (e.g., deposits from clients of a mixer). Second, it prevents graph explosion by combining a tagging database with a machine learning classifier for identifying addresses belonging to exchanges. We evaluate back-and-forth exploration on 30 malware families. We build oracles for 4 families using Bitcoin for C&C and use them to demonstrate that back-and-forth exploration identifies 13 C&C signaling addresses missed by prior work, 8 of which are fundamentally missed by forward-only explorations. Our approach uncovers a wealth of services used by the malware including 44 exchanges, 11 gambling sites, 5 payment service providers, 4 underground markets, 4 mining pools, and 2 mixers. In 4 families, the relations include new attribution points missed by forward-only explorations. It also identifies relationships between the malware families and other cybercrime campaigns, highlighting how some malware operators participate in a variety of cybercriminal activities.
Submission history
From: Gibran Gomez [view email][v1] Wed, 1 Jun 2022 10:21:30 UTC (729 KB)
[v2] Tue, 18 Oct 2022 12:15:40 UTC (737 KB)
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