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Privacy Comparison for Bitcoin Light Client Implementations

Authors Arad Kotzer , Ori Rottenstreich

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Author Details

Arad Kotzer
  • The Department of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel
Ori Rottenstreich
  • The Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technion, Haifa, Israel

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Arad Kotzer and Ori Rottenstreich. Privacy Comparison for Bitcoin Light Client Implementations. In 6th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 316, pp. 15:1-15:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2024.15

Abstract

Light clients implement a simple solution for Bitcoin’s scalability problem, as they do not store the entire blockchain but only the state of particular addresses of interest. To be able to keep track of the updated state of their addresses, light clients rely on full nodes to provide them with the required information. To do so, they must reveal information about the addresses they are interested in. This paper studies the two most common light client implementations, SPV and Neutrino with regards to their privacy. We define privacy metrics for comparing the privacy of the different implementations. We evaluate and compare the privacy of the implementations over time on real Bitcoin data and discuss the inherent privacy-communication tradeoff. In addition, we propose general techniques to enhance light client privacy in the existing implementations. Finally, we propose a new SPV-based light client model, the aggregation model, evaluate it, and show it can achieve enhanced privacy than in the existing light client implementations.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Networks → Network measurement
Keywords
  • Blockchain
  • Privacy
  • Light Clients
  • Bloom filter

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