A TRACEABILITY ANALYSIS OF MONERO’S BLOCKCHAIN

Download here : A Traceability Analysis of Monero’s Blockchain

Source : https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/338.pdf

Extract from Abstract

Monero is a cryptocurrency that has rapidly gained popularity since its launch in April 2014. The source of its growth can be mainly attributed to its unique privacy properties that go well beyond the pseudonymity property of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.In this work, we conduct a forensic analysis of the Monero blockchain. Our main goal is to investigate Monero’s untraceability guarantee, which essentially means that given a transaction input,the real output being redeemed in it should be anonymous among a set of other outputs. To this end, we develop three heuristics that lead to simple-to-implement attack routines. We evaluate our attacks on the Monero blockchain and show that in 87% of cases, the real output being redeemed can be easily identfi ed with certainty. Moreover, we have compelling evidence that two of our attacks also extend to Monero RingCTs — the second generation Monero that even hides the transaction value.

Author Details

Amrit Kumar
National University of Singapore
amrit@comp.nus.edu.sg

Clément Fischer
National University of Singapore
cfischer@comp.nus.edu.sg