When the cookie meets the blockchain

Cryptocurrencies are portrayed as a more anonymous and less traceable method of payment than credit cards. So if you shop online and pay with Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, how much privacy do you have? In a new paper, we show just how little.

Websites including shopping sites typically have dozens of third-party trackers per site. These third parties track sensitive details of payment flows, such as the items you add to your shopping cart, and their prices, regardless of how you choose to pay. Crucially, we find that many shopping sites leak enough information about your purchase to trackers that they can link it uniquely to the payment transaction on the blockchain. From there, there are well-known ways to further link that transaction to the rest of your Bitcoin wallet addresses. You can protect yourself by using browser extensions such as Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin, and by using Bitcoin anonymity techniques like CoinJoin. These measures help, but we find that linkages are still possible.

An illustration of the full scope of our attack. Consider three websites that happen to have the same embedded tracker. Alice makes purchases and pays with Bitcoin on the first two sites, and logs in on the third. Merchant A leaks a QR code of the transaction’s Bitcoin address to the tracker, merchant B leaks a purchase amount, and merchant C leaks Alice’s PII. Such leaks are commonplace today, and usually intentional. The tracker links these three purchases based on Alice’s browser cookie. Further, the tracker obtains enough information to uniquely (or near-uniquely) identify coins on the Bitcoin blockchain that correspond to the two purchases. However, Alice took the precaution of putting her bitcoins through CoinJoin before making purchases. Thus, either transaction individually could not have been traced back to Alice’s wallet, but there is only one wallet that participated in both CoinJoins, and is hence revealed to be Alice’s.

Using the privacy measurement tool OpenWPM, we analyzed 130 e-commerce sites that accept Bitcoin payments, and found that 53 of these sites leak transaction details to trackers. Many, but not all, of these leaks are by design, to enable advertising and analytics. Further, 49 sites leak personal identifiers to trackers: names, emails, usernames, and so on. This combination means that trackers can link real-world identities to Bitcoin addresses. To be clear, all of this leaked data is sitting in the logs of dozens of tracking companies, and the linkages can be done retroactively using past purchase data.

On a subset of these sites, we made real purchases using bitcoins that we first “mixed” using the CoinJoin anonymity technique.[1] We found that a tracker that observed two of our purchases — a common occurrence — would be able to identify our Bitcoin wallet 80% of the time. In our paper, we present the full details of our attack as well as a thorough analysis of its effectiveness.

Our findings are a reminder that systems without provable privacy properties may have unexpected information leaks and lurking privacy breaches. When multiple such systems interact, the leaks can be even more subtle. Anonymity in cryptocurrencies seems especially tricky, because it inherits the worst of both data anonymization (sensitive data must be publicly and permanently stored on the blockchain) and anonymous communication (privacy depends on subtle interactions arising from the behavior of users and applications).

[1] In this experiment we used 1–2 rounds of mixing. We provide evidence in the paper that while a higher mixing depth decreases the effectiveness of the attack, it doesn’t defeat it. There’s room for a more careful study of the tradeoffs here.