A Smart Card Based Security Extension for the Bitcoin Wallets

Abstract

Virtual currencies are being increasingly used around the globe. For this reason, the security of the Bitcoin wallets is also becoming a major concern for Bitcoin community. The security experts and developers are constantly at work to come up with concrete solutions for ensuring the security of Bitcoin wallets, so that their vulnerability exploitation could be reduced to zero. This is so, because every single day, a large number of attacks targeted towards Bitcoin, are being launched leading to monetary losses to a large number of Bitcoin users. In this regard, this research work gives a security analysis of existing Android Bitcoin wallets. It includes bypassing techniques used by malicious entities for the implemented security practices. Such techniques have also caused nancial losses to Bitcoin users. As a countermeasure, we have proposed a smart card based authentication scheme that can protect the users against all of the identi ed attacks.