Computer Science Colloquium - "Tracking Bitcoins in Criminal Operations"

Bitcoin is a crypto-currency that enables peer-to-peer payments in a way that is partially anonymous and which requires no central authorities. These features are attractive to many criminals, as it is difficult to track and shut down Bitcoin payments — difficult, but not impossible. In this talk, I present novel approaches to trace the flow of bitcoins in two types of criminal operations: (i) botnets that monetized CPU cycles through mining [NDSS ’14]; and (ii) ransomware, which encrypts files and demands bitcoins in exchange for decryption keys [IEEE S&P ’18]. In tracking bitcoin flows, I show how to estimate the revenue of criminal operations and measure the impact on victims.