BITKER: A P2P kernel client for bitcoin

Bitcoin has emerged as a disruptive technology able to revolutionize the way financial transactions are performed. The static analysis of the Bitcoin's blockchain conducted jointly with a real time analysis of the Bitcoin's Peer-To-Peer network can reveal interesting properties of the Bitcoin's ecosystem. In this paper we propose BitKer, a Bitcoin kernel client able to interact with the Peer-To-Peer network to retrieve information useful to support higher level analyses. BitKer offers an API to applications requiring an interaction with the underlying network, for instance to implement deanonymization strategies. In this work, we present a first set of experimental results obtained by three different logs, the last one of them obtained just after the August 2017 Bitcoin Cash hard fork. Results show that BitKer is effective in retrieving useful information and can be easily used as a basis for more complex analysis tools.