An Empirical Analysis of Traceability in the Monero Blockchain
By Malte Möser, Kyle Soska, Ethan Heilman, Kevin Lee, Henry Heffan, Shashvat Srivastava, Kyle Hogan, Jason Hennessey, Andrew K. Miller, Arvind Narayanan and 1 more. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2017
301 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Information Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffa7b79338fb948c8cd0fa3621172106546023fa
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In Information Systems
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Citations in the corpus
- Blockchain for Internet of Things: A Survey (2019, methodology): “However, recent study [117] demonstrates the weakness of the coin-mixed schemes via extensive realistic experiments based on Monero4.”
- Sex, Drugs, and Bitcoin: How Much Illegal Activity Is Financed through Cryptocurrencies? (2019, unknown): “During our sample period, a number of opaque cryptocurrencies, such as Monero, Dash, and ZCash, also known as “privacy coins,” emerged and gained some degree of adoption among illegal users.”
- Zether: Towards Privacy in a Smart Contract World (2020, background): “QuisQuis [FMMO18] is a new anonymity system designed to address some of the problems with cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash (e.g., the set of unspent outputs keep growing).”