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A Tip for IOTA Privacy: IOTA Light Node Deanonymization via Tip Selection

Hojung Yang, Suhyeon Lee, Seungjoo Kim

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that tip selection can be exploited to compromise users’ privacy and provides solutions to mitigate these attacks and proposes ways to enhance anonymity in the IOTA network while maintaining efficiency and scalability.

Abstract

IOTA is a distributed ledger technology that uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure called the Tangle. It is known for its efficiency and is widely used in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. Tangle can be configured by utilizing the tip selection process. Due to performance issues with light nodes, full nodes are being asked to perform the tip selections of light nodes. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that tip selection can be exploited to compromise users' privacy. An adversary full node can associate a transaction with the identity of a light node by comparing the light node's request with its ledger. We show that these types of attacks are not only viable in the current IOTA environment but also in IOTA 2.0 and the privacy improvement being studied. We also provide solutions to mitigate these attacks and propose ways to enhance anonymity in the IOTA network while maintaining efficiency and scalability.

A Tip for IOTA Privacy: IOTA Light Node Deanonymization via Tip Selection

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that tip selection can be exploited to compromise users’ privacy and provides solutions to mitigate these attacks and proposes ways to enhance anonymity in the IOTA network while maintaining efficiency and scalability.

Abstract

IOTA is a distributed ledger technology that uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure called the Tangle. It is known for its efficiency and is widely used in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. Tangle can be configured by utilizing the tip selection process. Due to performance issues with light nodes, full nodes are being asked to perform the tip selections of light nodes. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that tip selection can be exploited to compromise users' privacy. An adversary full node can associate a transaction with the identity of a light node by comparing the light node's request with its ledger. We show that these types of attacks are not only viable in the current IOTA environment but also in IOTA 2.0 and the privacy improvement being studied. We also provide solutions to mitigate these attacks and propose ways to enhance anonymity in the IOTA network while maintaining efficiency and scalability.
Paper Structure (23 sections, 7 equations, 5 figures, 2 tables, 1 algorithm)

This paper contains 23 sections, 7 equations, 5 figures, 2 tables, 1 algorithm.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Works
  3. IOTA network
  4. Tip selection
  5. Privacy
  6. System Model and Approach
  7. System model
  8. Approach
  9. Analysis on Anonymity in IOTA Tip Selection
  10. Decentralized environment
  11. Real world node distribution
  12. Privacy-enhanced environment
  13. IOTA 2.0
  14. Mitigation Against the Proposed Attack
  15. Full node scaling and global tip selection request
  16. ...and 8 more sections

Figures (5)

  • Figure 1: If a light node requests tip selection to an adversarial node, the attacker can determine the identity probabilistically after the transaction is generated.
  • Figure 2: Global map of IOTA full nodes with neighboring relationships.ref3
  • Figure 3: Attack Success Probability in the Real World
  • Figure 4: Adversary selection probability heatmap
  • Figure 5: Maximum and minimum adversary selection probability in random distribution (N=100)