A First Look at the Usability of Bitcoin Key Management

Eskandari, Shayan; Barrera, David; Stobert, Elizabeth; Clark, Jeremy

doi:10.14722/usec.2015.23015

Cited by 88 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…In a seminal study on the usability of cryptocurrencies and related software, Eskandari et al (2015) have reviewed methods and tools for storing and managing private keys for cryptocurrency wallets, where they identify "key management" as a fundamental usability issue in the Bitcoin ecosystem [18]. Krombholz et al's (2016) later large-scale survey and interviews on the habits of cryptocurrency users confirms this finding [50].…”

Section: The Blockchain As a Design Materialsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Towards Materials for Computational Heirlooms

Baytaş

Coşkun

Yantaç

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference

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This paper explores the contrasting notions of "permanance and disposability," "the digital and the physical," and "symbolism and function" in the context of interaction design. Drawing from diverse streams of knowledge, we describe a novel design direction for enduring computational heirlooms based on the marriage of decentralized, trustless software and durable mobile hardware. To justify this concept, we review prior research; attempt to redefine the notion of "material;" propose blockchain-based software as a particular digital material to serve as a substrate for computational heirlooms; and argue for the use of mobile artifacts, informed in terms of their materials and formgiving practices by mechanical wristwatches, as its physical embodiment and functional counterpart. This integration is meant to enable mobile and ubiquitous interactive systems for the storing, experiencing, and exchanging value throughout multiple human lifetimes; showcasing the feats of computational sciences and crafts; and enabling novel user experiences.

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Section: The Blockchain As a Design Materialsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Towards Materials for Computational Heirlooms

Baytaş

Coşkun

Yantaç

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference

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“…Developers of Bitcoin software have attempted a variety of approaches solve, or at least mask, longstanding usability issues with key storage and management. Eskandari et al [43] propose a set of evaluation criteria for the usability of Bitcoin key management interfaces and conclude that current tools employ complex metaphors which do not fully capture the implications of key management actions.…”

Section: B Key Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

Bonneau

Miller

Clark³

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

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927

580

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Bitcoin has emerged as the most successful cryptographic currency in history. Within two years of its quiet launch in 2009, Bitcoin grew to comprise billions of dollars of economic value despite only cursory analysis of the system's design. Since then a growing literature has identified hidden-but-important properties of the system, discovered attacks, proposed promising alternatives, and singled out difficult future challenges. Meanwhile a large and vibrant open-source community has proposed and deployed numerous modifications and extensions.We provide the first systematic exposition Bitcoin and the many related cryptocurrencies or 'altcoins.' Drawing from a scattered body of knowledge, we identify three key components of Bitcoin's design that can be decoupled. This enables a more insightful analysis of Bitcoin's properties and future stability. We map the design space for numerous proposed modifications, providing comparative analyses for alternative consensus mechanisms, currency allocation mechanisms, computational puzzles, and key management tools. We survey anonymity issues in Bitcoin and provide an evaluation framework for analyzing a variety of privacy-enhancing proposals. Finally we provide new insights on what we term disintermediation protocols, which absolve the need for trusted intermediaries in an interesting set of applications. We identify three general disintermediation strategies and provide a detailed comparison. I. WHY BITCOIN IS WORTHY OF RESEARCHConsider two opposing viewpoints on Bitcoin in strawman form. The first is that "Bitcoin works in practice, but not in theory." At times devoted members of the Bitcoin community espouse this philosophy and criticize the security research community for failing to discover Bitcoin, not immediately recognizing its novelty, and still today dismissing it due to the lack of a rigorous theoretical foundation.A second viewpoint is that Bitcoin's stability relies on an unknown combination of socioeconomic factors which is hopelessly intractable to model with sufficient precision, failing to yield a convincing argument for the system's soundness. Given these difficulties, experienced security researchers may avoid Bitcoin as a topic of study, considering it prudent security engineering to only design systems with precise threat models that admit formal security proofs.We intend to show where each of these simplistic viewpoints fail. To the first, we contend that while Bitcoin has worked surprisingly well in practice so far, there is an important role for research to play in identifying precisely why this has been possible, moving beyond a blind acceptance of the informal arguments presented with the system's initial proposal. Furthermore, it is crucial to understand whether Bitcoin will still "work in practice" as practices change. We expect external political and economic factors to evolve, the system must change if and when transaction volume scales, and the nature of the monetary rewards for Bitcoin miners will change over time as part of the system design....

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“…All types of tokens require the protection of private keys and secrets linked with user identities. For this purpose, two main categories of wallets have emerged -self-sovereign wallets and hosted wallets [50], [20], [69]. Beside technical risks, all crypto-tokens are exposed to regulatory risk, while non-native tokens are in addition exposed to legal risks [93].…”

Section: A Crypto-tokens and Walletsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Security Reference Architecture for Blockchains

Homoliak

Venugopalan

Hum

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)

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Due to their interesting features, blockchains have become popular in recent years. They are full-stack systems where security is a critical factor for their success. The main focus of this work is to systematize knowledge about security and privacy issues of blockchains. To this end, we propose a security reference architecture based on models that demonstrate the stacked hierarchy of various threats (similar to the ISO/OSI hierarchy) as well as threat-risk assessment using ISO/IEC 15408. In contrast to the previous surveys [39], [8], [139], [20], we focus on the categorization of security incidents based on their origins and using the proposed architecture we present existing prevention and mitigation techniques. The scope of our work mainly covers aspects related to decentralized nature of blockchains, while we mention common operational security issues and countermeasures only tangentially.Index Terms-blockchain • distributed ledgers • reference architecture • threat-risk assessment arXiv:1904.06898v1 [cs.CR]

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A First Look at the Usability of Bitcoin Key Management

Cited by 88 publications

References 17 publications

Towards Materials for Computational Heirlooms

Towards Materials for Computational Heirlooms

SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

A Security Reference Architecture for Blockchains

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