Practical Blockchain-Based Steganographic Communication Via Adversarial AI: A Case Study In Bitcoin

Abstract

With the development of 5G, the wireless Internet of Things (IoT) has become possible; how to provide privacy protections for the communication of IoT devices in a more vulnerable wireless transmission environment is a huge challenge. Thus, steganography is introduced as a safe and effective technology. Blockchain systems have been widely used in the area of steganography. Several works attempted to embed covert data into transactions in public blockchain systems such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero. However, most of them merely focus on putting covert data into certain fields in transactions based on cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, a Covert Transaction Recognition (CTR) model is proposed by the Text Convolutional Neural Networks and Back Propagation Neural Networks. When utilizing the covert data-embedded field for recognizing, our CTR model can attain 0.79 precision and 0.83 recall on average for seven covert transaction construction schemes. The precision and recall can increase by at most 43 and 47%, respectively, if other unembedded fields were additionally exploited for recognition. We further propose a Practical Covert Transaction Construction (PCTC) model. This model fixes the contents in the embedded fields of the constructed transactions, and generates the contents in other fields using Generative Adversarial Networks. Experimental results demonstrated that the precision and recall are greatly decreased when identifying the covert transactions generated by our PCTC model. The data underlying this article are available in ‘covert-transaction-model’, at https://github.com/1997mint/covert-transaction-model.