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/lp/de-gruyter/tithonus-a-bitcoin-based-censorship-resilient-system-NTMvQwrW0C
- Publisher
- de Gruyter
- Copyright
- © 2019 Ruben Recabarren et al., published by Sciendo
- ISSN
- 2299-0984
- eISSN
- 2299-0984
- DOI
- 10.2478/popets-2019-0005
- Publisher site
- See Article on Publisher Site
Abstract
AbstractProviding reliable and surreptitious communications is difficult in the presence of adaptive and resourceful state level censors. In this paper we introduce Tithonus, a framework that builds on the Bitcoin blockchain and network to provide censorship-resistant communication mechanisms. In contrast to previous approaches, we do not rely solely on the slow and expensive blockchain consensus mechanism but instead fully exploit Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer gossip protocol. We develop adaptive, fast and cost effective data communication solutions that camouflage client requests into inconspicuous Bitcoin transactions. We propose solutions to securely request and transfer content, with unobservability and censorship resistance, and free, pay-per-access and subscription based payment options. When compared to state-of-the-art Bitcoin writing solutions, Tithonus reduces the cost of transferring data to censored clients by 2 orders of magnitude and increases the goodput by 3 to 5 orders of magnitude. We show that Tithonus client initiated transactions are hard to detect, while server initiated transactions cannot be censored without creating split world problems to the Bit-coin blockchain.
Journal
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies – de Gruyter
Published: Jan 1, 2019