Double-spending prevention for Bitcoin zero-confirmation transactions
Pérez-Solà, Cristina (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Enginyeria de la Informació i de les Comunicacions)
Delgado-Segura, Sergi (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Enginyeria de la Informació i de les Comunicacions)
Navarro-Arribas, Guillermo (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Enginyeria de la Informació i de les Comunicacions)
Herrera-Joancomartí, Jordi (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament d'Enginyeria de la Informació i de les Comunicacions)

Date:	2019
Abstract:	Zero-confirmation transactions, i. e. transactions that have been broadcast but are still pending to be included in the blockchain, have gained attention in order to enable fast payments in Bitcoin, shortening the time for performing payments. Fast payments are desirable in certain scenarios, for instance, when buying in vending machines, fast food restaurants, or withdrawing from an ATM. Despite being quickly propagated through the network, zero-confirmation transactions are not protected against double-spending attacks, since the double-spending protection Bitcoin offers relies on the blockchain and, by definition, such transactions are not yet included in it. In this paper, we propose a double-spending prevention mechanism for Bitcoin zero-confirmation transactions. Our proposal is based on exploiting the flexibility of the Bitcoin scripting language together with a well-known vulnerability of the ECDSA signature scheme to discourage attackers from performing such an attack.
Grants:	Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2014-55243-P Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca 2014/SGR-691
Rights:	Tots els drets reservats.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió acceptada per publicar
Subject:	Bitcoin ; Blockchain ; Cryptocurrency ; Double-spending ; ECDSA
Published in:	International Journal of Information Security, Vol. 18, Issue 4 (August 2019) , p. 451-463, ISSN 1615-5270

DOI: 10.1007/s10207-018-0422-4

Postprint 14 p, 7.1 MB

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Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Engineering > Security of Networks and Distributed Applications (SENDA)
Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Engineering > Combinatorics, Coding and Security Group (CCSG)
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles