A first look at the usability of bitcoin key management

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the usability of Bitcoin key management, highlighting challenges and proposing a framework to compare approaches, revealing both shared and unique issues in Bitcoin's key handling.

Contribution

It introduces a new evaluation framework for Bitcoin key management and provides a broad usability assessment of six Bitcoin clients.

Findings

Bitcoin shares common key management challenges with other domains.

Bitcoin presents unique opportunities to rethink key management.

Usability issues impact security and user experience.

Abstract

Bitcoin users are directly or indirectly forced to deal with public key cryptography, which has a number of security and usability challenges that differ from the password-based authentication underlying most online banking services. Users must ensure that keys are simultaneously accessible, resistant to digital theft and resilient to loss. In this paper, we contribute an evaluation framework for comparing Bitcoin key management approaches, and conduct a broad usability evaluation of six representative Bitcoin clients. We find that Bitcoin shares many of the fundamental challenges of key management known from other domains, but that Bitcoin may present a unique opportunity to rethink key management for end users.