Open Access

ARTICLE

A Covert Communication Method Using Special Bitcoin Addresses Generated by Vanitygen

Lejun Zhang^{1, 2}, Zhijie Zhang¹, Weizheng Wang³, Rasheed Waqas¹, Chunhui Zhao^{1, 4}, Seokhoon Kim⁵, Huiling Chen^{6, *}

1 College of Information Engineering, Yangzhou University, Yangzhou, 225127, China.
2 School Math & Computer Science, Quanzhou Normal University, Quanzhou, 362000, China.
3 University of Aizu, Aizu Wakamatsu, 9658580, Japan.
4 College of Information and Communication Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, 150001, China.
5 Department of Computer Software Engineering, Soonchunhyang University, Asan, Korea.
6 Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou, 325035, China.

* Corresponding Author: Huiling Chen. Email: .

Computers, Materials & Continua 2020, 65(1), 597-616. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2020.011554

Received 16 May 2020; Accepted 29 May 2020; Issue published 23 July 2020

Abstract

As an extension of the traditional encryption technology, information hiding has been increasingly used in the fields of communication and network media, and the covert communication technology has gradually developed. The blockchain technology that has emerged in recent years has the characteristics of decentralization and tamper resistance, which can effectively alleviate the disadvantages and problems of traditional covert communication. However, its combination with covert communication thus far has been mostly at the theoretical level. The BLOCCE method, as an early result of the combination of blockchain and covert communication technology, has the problems of low information embedding efficiency, the use of too many Bitcoin addresses, low communication efficiency, and high costs. The present research improved on this method, designed the V-BLOCCE which uses base58 to encrypt the plaintext and reuses the addresses generated by Vanitygen multiple times to embed information. This greatly improves the efficiency of information embedding and decreases the number of Bitcoin addresses used. Under the premise of ensuring the order, the Bitcoin transaction OP_RETURN field is used to store the information required to restore the plaintext and the transactions are issued at the same time to improve the information transmission efficiency. Thus, a more efficient and feasible method for the application of covert communication on the blockchain is proposed. In addition, this paper also provides a more feasible scheme and theoretical support for covert communication in blockchain.

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