A Novel Covert Communication Method Based on Bitcoin Transaction

With the worldwide promotion and application of 5G technology, the info transmitted on the network show explosive growth, and therefore the secure sharing of its important data remains one among the research hotspots. Steganography embeds the info that must be shared into digital carrier files and transmits it through open channels, which has important applications in protecting data sharing and realizing covert communication. However, the encrypted files generated by traditional steganography are vulnerable to compression, cropping, geometric attacks, and man-made destruction within the process of open channel transmission, leading to data loss, making it difficult for the receiver to properly extract secret message. Currently, covert communication on blockchain can solve the above problems, but it also brings some new problems like high computational complexity, low transmission efficiency, and nondetection resistance. Therefore, during this article, a covert communication method supported Bitcoin transactions is proposed. The proposed method first designs the index matrix of the transaction address. Then, the address interaction relationship that carries the key message through the transaction index matrix is made . Finally, the address interaction relationship that carries the key message is combined with the transaction amount to finish the covert transmission of the key message on the blockchain environment. The proposed method improves the safety and embedding efficiency of covert communication, reduces the amount of transactions, and ensures the integrity of extracting secret message. A series of experimental results show that under the condition of ensuring the required security, the proposed method retains the strong robustness of the prevailing blockchain steganography and has strong resistance to detection.