CAREER: Cryptocurrency Forensics Tools

加密货币，如比特币，越来越受欢迎。这些加密货币提供了提高效率和减少金融体系摩擦的承诺，例如国际汇款费用和与筹集投资资本相关的成本。不幸的是，它们也被滥用为勒索、毒品、人口贩运和网络犯罪等非法活动的支付机制。这些非法活动可能会削弱这些加密货币的声誉，并为实体和个人带来大量伤害。改进的取证工具可以潜在地对非法交易进行去匿名化或捕获有关交易的有价值的语义信息（例如，在特定交易中购买了什么），可以减少这两种负面影响。该项目将进行开放式研究，以提高我们对如何设计可供研究人员、公司和调查人员采用的改进的加密货币取证技术的理解。目前，许多对先进加密货币取证技术的研究都是由公司进行的，并集成到他们的封闭平台中。这导致人们对如何检测和理解这些加密货币生态系统中发生的非法活动缺乏公开的、可推广的理解。该项目中开发的先进加密货币取证工具将是开放的，并能够改进对非法加密货币交易的检测。该项目还将为学生提供金融技术，安全和机器学习方面的专业知识，这些都是国家广泛需求的领域。实现提高加密货币取证工具效率的目标需要在几个关键挑战方面取得进展。 这些措施包括：（1）设计和实施改进和开放的加密货币取证数据收集和归档系统。(2)调查加密货币地址标签技术。(3)设计改进的地址聚类和流跟踪算法。该项目中提出的方法是独一无二的，因为它将数据收集和归档的改进与基于先进机器学习的算法相结合。该项目将加深对如何有效地对各种加密货币进行取证的理解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are growing in popularity. These cryptocurrencies offer the promise of increased efficiency and decreasing frictions in the financial system, such as international money transfer fees and costs associated with raising investment capital. Unfortunately, they are also misused as a payment mechanism for illicit activities such as extortion, drugs, human trafficking, and cybercrime. These illicit activities have likely diminished the reputation of these cryptocurrencies and facilitated large amounts of harm for entities and individual people. Improved forensic tools that can potentially de-anonymize illicit transactions or capture valuable semantic information about a transaction (for example, what was purchased in a particular transaction), could reduce both of these negative effects. This project will conduct open research that will improve our understanding of how to devise improved cryptocurrency forensic techniques that can be adopted by researchers, companies, and investigators. Much of the research into advanced cryptocurrency forensic techniques is currently being performed by companies and integrated into their closed platforms. This has resulted in a lack of public, generalizable understanding of how to detect and understand the illicit activities occurring within these cryptocurrency ecosystems. The advanced cryptocurrency forensics tools developed in this project will be open and enable improved detection of illicit cryptocurrency transactions. This project will also provide students with expertise in financial technology, security, and machine learning which are all areas of broad national needs.Achieving the goal of improving the efficacy of cryptocurrency forensics tools requires progress on several key challenges. These include: (1) Designing and implementing improved and open cryptocurrency forensic data collection and archiving systems. (2) Investigating cryptocurrency address labeling techniques. (3) Designing algorithms for improved clustering of addresses and flow tracing. The approach proposed in this project is unique in that it blends improvements to data collection and archiving with advanced machine learning-based algorithms. The project will deepen the understanding of how to effectively perform forensics of a broad range of cryptocurrencies. The ability to effectively forensically analyze cryptocurrencies fundamentally affects our ability to understand and mitigate illicit activities that impact many United States citizens.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.