Möser, Malte and Soska, Kyle and Heilman, Ethan and Lee, Kevin and Heffan, Henry and Srivastava, Shashvat and Hogan, Kyle and Hennessey, Jason and Miller, Andrew and Narayanan, Arvind and Christin, Nicolas (2018) An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain. Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, 2018 (3). pp. 143-163.
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Abstract
Monero is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that allows users to obscure their transactions by including chaff coins, called “mixins,” along with the actual coins they spend. In this paper, we empirically evaluate two weaknesses in Monero’s mixin sampling strategy. First, about 62% of transaction inputs with one or more mixins are vulnerable to “chain-reaction” analysis - that is, the real input can be deduced by elimination. Second, Monero mixins are sampled in such a way that they can be easily distinguished from the real coins by their age distribution; in short, the real input is usually the “newest” input. We estimate that this heuristic can be used to guess the real input with 80% accuracy over all transactions with 1 or more mixins. Next, we turn to the Monero ecosystem and study the importance of mining pools and the former anonymous marketplace AlphaBay on the transaction volume. We find that after removing mining pool activity, there remains a large amount of potentially privacy-sensitive transactions that are affected by these weaknesses. We propose and evaluate two countermeasures that can improve the privacy of future transactions.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | Main Topics > Blockchain Projects > BloSSom 2019 Main Topics > Monero Main Topics > Privacy |
| Divisions: | Computer Science |
| Depositing User: | Unnamed user with email richard.dabels@uni-rostock.de |
| Date Deposited: | 03 Sep 2019 16:34 |
| Last Modified: | 03 Sep 2019 16:34 |
| URI: | http://blossom.informatik.uni-rostock.de/id/eprint/21 |
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