Journal of Computer Science and Technology ›› 2020, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (4): 843-862.doi: 10.1007/s11390-020-9638-7

Special Issue: Surveys; Computer Networks and Distributed Computing

• Computer Networks and Distributed Computing • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Data Security and Privacy in Bitcoin System: A Survey

Lie-Huang Zhu1, Member, CCF, IEEE, Bao-Kun Zheng1,2, Meng Shen1,3,*, Member, CCF, IEEE, Feng Gao1, Hong-Yu Li1, Ke-Xin Shi1        

  1. 1 School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China;
    2 School of Information Management for Law, China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing 102249, China;
    3 Key Laboratory of Information Network Security, Ministry of Public Security, Shanghai 201204, China
  • Received:2019-04-16 Revised:2020-04-08 Online:2020-07-20 Published:2020-07-20
  • Contact: Meng Shen E-mail:shenmeng@bit.edu.cn
  • About author:Lie-Huang Zhu received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, in 2004. He is currently a professor at the School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing. His research interests include security protocol analysis and design, group key exchange protocols, wireless sensor networks, and cloud computing.
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province of China under Grant No. 2019B010137003, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. U1836212, 61972039, 61872041, 61602039 and 61871037, the Beijing Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 4192050, the Key Laboratory of Information Network Security, Ministry of Public Security, and the Pre-Study Foundation of Weapons and Equipment under Grant No. 31511020401.

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To date, bitcoin has been the most successful application of blockchain technology and has received considerable attention from both industry and academia. Bitcoin is an electronic payment system based on cryptography rather than on credit. Regardless of whether people are in the same city or country, bitcoin can be sent by any one person to any other person when they reach an agreement. The market value of bitcoin has been rising since its advent in 2009, and its current market value is US160 billion. Since its development, bitcoin itself has exposed many problems and is facing challenges from all the sectors of society; therefore, adversaries may use bitcoin's weakness to make considerable profits. This survey presents an overview and detailed investigation of data security and privacy in bitcoin system. We examine the studies in the literature/Web in two categories:1) analyses of the attacks to the privacy, availability, and consistency of bitcoin data and 2) summaries of the countermeasures for bitcoin data security. Based on the literature/Web, we list and describe the research methods and results for the two categories. We compare the performance of these methods and illustrate the relationship between the performance and the methods. Moreover, we present several important open research directions to identify the follow-up studies in this area.

Key words: security; privacy; bitcoin; availability; consistency;

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