Privacy and anonymity are important desiderata in the use of cryptocurrencies.
\nMonero\u2014a privacy centric cryptocurrency has rapidly gained popularity
\ndue to its unlinkability and untraceablity guarantees. It has a market capitalization
\nof USD 290M. In this work, we quantify the efficacy of three attacks
\non Monero\u2019s untraceability guarantee, which promises to make it hard to trace
\nthe origin of a received fund, by analyzing its blockchain data. To this end, we
\ndevelop three attack routines and evaluate them on the Monero blockchain. Our
\nresults show that in 88% of cases, the origin of the funds can be easily determined
\nwith certainty. Moreover, we have compelling evidence that two of the attack routines
\nalso extend to Monero RingCTs\u2014the second generation Monero that even
\nhides the transaction amount. We further observe that over 98% of the results
\ncan in fact be obtained by a simple temporal analysis. In light of our findings,
\nwe discuss mitigations to strengthen Monero against these attacks.We shared our
\nfindings with theMonero development team and the general community. This has
\nresulted into several discussions and proposals for fixes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Privacy and anonymity are important desiderata in the use of cryptocurrencies. Monero\u2014a privacy centric cryptocurrency has rapidly gained popularity due to its unlinkability and untraceablity guarantees. It has a market capitalization of USD 290M. In this work, we quantify the efficacy of three attacks on Monero\u2019s untraceability guarantee, which promises to make it hard to 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