Dust attacks, use cases and Protective measures

[Emjay24]

What is a dust attack?

A Dust attack is a scenario whereby an attacker sends tiny amounts of bitcoin (dust) to an address. It is a coordinated attack usually sent to numerous addresses, often thousands of them at a time. This kind of attack is not harmful initially when the dust sits in the address and as such the victim might ignore them but when the victim spends the dust together with other UTXOs present in their wallet(if the wallet automatically includes UTXOS during transactions), the attacker can analyze the transactions and have the leverage of linking multiple addresses together and deanonymizing the user.

Diagrammatic representation:



Why dust attacks are initiated

- Linking of wallets Chain analysis companies can initiate such to deanonymize wallets and be able to link certain wallets to a real person.

- Phishing attack:Can serve as a conception phase to a social engineering/ phishing attack as scammers can include OP_RETURN messages of links to phishing sites which can lead to assets loss if victims are lured to the sites having read and believed the message.

Illustrating this attack



Protective Measures against dust attacks
- Use of modern wallets: Thankfully, some modern wallets like electrum has features that allows you to mark the dust input as "Do Not Spend" which would prevent you from accidentally spending them in the future.

- Migrate funds: You can choose to create a new wallet and migrate other inputs to a new address, leaving the dust behind.

-Using COIN CONTROL features: You can opt to use COIN CONTROL feature to enable you manually select the UTXOs to spend, although this is an advanced feature and needs good understanding to use it.


Contributions and corrections are highly welcome

[Ruttoshi]

Coin control does not need much knowledge to use it as long as you are using electrum wallet. Coin control helps you to choose which address that you want to send your coin from. It is good because it gives you an option to choose the UTXO that you want to spend from.

You can also freeze the dust before sending any funds out of your wallet to avoid any mistakes. Like you said, creating a new wallet and moving all your funds there is the best way to stay safe from dust attack.

[Hypnotizer]

@OP you have said it all but the things wey I go like add to this be say make we dey avoid sharing our wallet address publicly (especially if u no dey use Electrum wallet) because e dey increase the possibility of this dust attacks…and you go still fit consider mixing services or using coin anonymization tools to safeguard your privacy but you gat dey careful when using dem…..and make we dey very cautious about every small or large transaction wey we wan do and make we make sure say we keep track of our unspent UTXOs.

This dust attack dey very complicated and so we need to understand how these attacks dey work and make we implement the protective measures wey we know to avoid losing our privacy.

[Jubilee58]

What is a dust attack?

A Dust attack is a scenario whereby an attacker sends tiny amounts of bitcoin (dust) to an address. It is a coordinated attack usually sent to numerous addresses, often thousands of them at a time. This kind of attack is not harmful initially when the dust sits in the address and as such the victim might ignore them but when the victim spends the dust together with other UTXOs present in their wallet(if the wallet automatically includes UTXOS during transactions), the attacker can analyze the transactions and have the leverage of linking multiple addresses together and deanonymizing the user.

Diagrammatic representation:



Why dust attacks are initiated

- Linking of wallets Chain analysis companies can initiate such to deanonymize wallets and be able to link certain wallets to a real person.

- Phishing attack:Can serve as a conception phase to a social engineering/ phishing attack as scammers can include OP_RETURN messages of links to phishing sites which can lead to assets loss if victims are lured to the sites having read and believed the message.

Illustrating this attack



Protective Measures against dust attacks
- Use of modern wallets: Thankfully, some modern wallets like electrum has features that allows you to mark the dust input as "Do Not Spend" which would prevent you from accidentally spending them in the future.

- Migrate funds: You can choose to create a new wallet and migrate other inputs to a new address, leaving the dust behind.

-Using COIN CONTROL features: You can opt to use COIN CONTROL feature to enable you manually select the UTXOs to spend, although this is an advanced feature and needs good understanding to use it.


Contributions and corrections are highly welcome

Your information is a vital one,  we should be very much careful to make use of any extra bitcoin that is found in our wallet in other to prevent this dust attack, and every protective measures should be deployed to ensure the safety our bitcoin wallet.

[Zaguru12]

@OP you have said it all but the things wey I go like add to this be say make we dey avoid sharing our wallet address publicly (especially if u no dey use Electrum wallet) because e dey increase the possibility of this dust attacks…

I think what you mean is actually that we shouldn’t be posting our addresses on social media or other platforms always not to make us a target easily. But saying it shouldn’t be public is wrong because wallet addresses are actually public most especially if you have made a transaction relating to that address because the information can be obtained from blockchain which is public. Also there is no distinction for electrum in this kind of attacks you would still get attacked just that you can actually manage it well because of its features.

You can also freeze the dust before sending any funds out of your wallet to avoid any mistakes. Like you said, creating a new wallet and moving all your funds there is the best way to stay safe from dust attack.

The thing about actually creating new wallet and moving funds there is that it still doesn’t stops it, because the attacker can still publicly see the address of the new wallet once the initial dust attacked address is used in the transaction. So the attacker can still actually attack the new address yet again. The only way out is maybe when you use coinjoin or mixers during the move to not have the new wallet to interact with the old one,

The only thing I see once can do more is to prioritize the use of different addresses for different transactions even though this doesn’t totally eliminate it. Also one could be cutious of copying and pasting addresses from transaction history

[Africolo]

- Use of modern wallets: Thankfully, some modern wallets like electrum has features that allows you to mark the dust input as "Do Not Spend" which would prevent you from accidentally spending them in the future.

- Migrate funds: You can choose to create a new wallet and migrate other inputs to a new address, leaving the dust behind.

-Using COIN CONTROL features: You can opt to use COIN CONTROL feature to enable you manually select the UTXOs to spend, although this is an advanced feature and needs good understanding to use it.


Contributions and corrections are highly welcome

The Dust Threasom feature on Wasabi wallet safeguard the wallet from dust attack better; this feature allows you to set the minimum of Sats you want to receive in your wallet, since dust attack are usually very tiny amounts of Sats, you can set your Dust Threasom limit to $2-$3 worth of Sats, this way your wallet will not receive anything less than $3 worth of Sats. This saves you from using coin control to navigate through wallets looking for dust coins.

I've been expecting some other software wallets to implement this features for a long time but it hasn't happened yet.

[lontivero]

- Use of modern wallets: Thankfully, some modern wallets like electrum has features that allows you to mark the dust input as "Do Not Spend" which would prevent you from accidentally spending them in the future.

- Migrate funds: You can choose to create a new wallet and migrate other inputs to a new address, leaving the dust behind.

-Using COIN CONTROL features: You can opt to use COIN CONTROL feature to enable you manually select the UTXOs to spend, although this is an advanced feature and needs good understanding to use it.


Contributions and corrections are highly welcome

The Dust Threasom feature on Wasabi wallet safeguard the wallet from dust attack better; this feature allows you to set the minimum of Sats you want to receive in your wallet, since dust attack are usually very tiny amounts of Sats, you can set your Dust Threasom limit to $2-$3 worth of Sats, this way your wallet will not receive anything less than $3 worth of Sats. This saves you from using coin control to navigate through wallets looking for dust coins.

I've been expecting some other software wallets to implement this features for a long time but it hasn't happened yet.

It is even better than that, a dust attack is when your wallet receives a very small amount of sats to an **already used** address. That's why the Wasabi dust attack threshold doesn't prevent you from receiving very small amount of sats but from receiving very small amount of sats to addresses that have already been used.

[Africolo]

It is even better than that, a dust attack is when your wallet receives a very small amount of sats to an **already used** address. That's why the Wasabi dust attack threshold doesn't prevent you from receiving very small amount of sats but from receiving very small amount of sats to addresses that have already been used.

Someone can only dust a know/ used addresses, never seen unused addresses get dusted. Btw the threshold features covers the entire addresses ( Used and unused )

[lontivero]

It is even better than that, a dust attack is when your wallet receives a very small amount of sats to an **already used** address. That's why the Wasabi dust attack threshold doesn't prevent you from receiving very small amount of sats but from receiving very small amount of sats to addresses that have already been used.

Someone can only dust a know/ used addresses, never seen unused addresses get dusted. Btw the threshold features covers the entire addresses ( Used and unused )

No, it does not. It only prevents receiving to **used** addresses. Receiving small amount to unused addresses it not an attack and that's why it doesn't prevent such a perfectly valid scenario.

[Africolo]

It is even better than that, a dust attack is when your wallet receives a very small amount of sats to an **already used** address. That's why the Wasabi dust attack threshold doesn't prevent you from receiving very small amount of sats but from receiving very small amount of sats to addresses that have already been used.

Someone can only dust a know/ used addresses, never seen unused addresses get dusted. Btw the threshold features covers the entire addresses ( Used and unused )

No, it does not. It only prevents receiving to **used** addresses. Receiving small amount to unused addresses it not an attack and that's why it doesn't prevent such a perfectly valid scenario.

The UTXO could still be added to your transactions If not freezed so it's still a dust attack. Then again you're only vulnerable to dust attack if your addresses are public.