Document Open Access Logo

Analysis of CryptoNote Transaction Graphs Using the Dulmage-Mendelsohn Decomposition

Author Saravanan Vijayakumaran

PDF
Thumbnail PDF

File

LIPIcs.AFT.2023.28.pdf
  • Filesize: 0.81 MB
  • 22 pages

Document Identifiers

Author Details

Saravanan Vijayakumaran
  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India

Acknowledgements

We thank Justin Ehrenhofer for sharing the blockchain databases of the (no longer operational) Monero Original, MoneroV, Monero v7, and Monero v9 forks. We also thank him for his feedback on an earlier version of this paper, which helped improve the presentation of the empirical results. We thank Zuoxia Yu for sharing the full version of their FC 2019 paper. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of PoPETs 2022 (where an earlier version of this paper was eventually rejected) and of the current conference for their comments. We prepared the instructions for reproducing our empirical results on the suggestion of a PoPETs 2022 reviewer.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Saravanan Vijayakumaran. Analysis of CryptoNote Transaction Graphs Using the Dulmage-Mendelsohn Decomposition. In 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 282, pp. 28:1-28:22, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.28

Abstract

CryptoNote blockchains like Monero represent the largest public deployments of linkable ring signatures. Beginning with the work of Kumar et al. (ESORICS 2017) and Möser et al. (PoPETs 2018), several techniques have been proposed to trace CryptoNote transactions, i.e. identify the actual signing key, by using the transaction history. Yu et al. (FC 2019) introduced the closed set attack for undeniable traceability and proved that it is optimal by showing that it has the same performance as the brute-force attack. However, they could only implement an approximation of the closed set attack due to its exponential time complexity. In this paper, we show that the Dulmage-Mendelsohn (DM) decomposition of bipartite graphs gives a polynomial-time implementation of the closed set attack. Our contribution includes open source implementations of the DM decomposition and the clustering algorithm (the approximation to the closed set attack proposed by Yu et al). Using these implementations, we evaluate the empirical performance of these methods on the Monero dataset in two ways - firstly using data only from the main Monero chain and secondly using data from four hard forks of Monero in addition to the main Monero chain. We have released the scripts used to perform the empirical analysis along with step-by-step instructions.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security
Keywords
  • Cryptocurrency
  • CryptoNote
  • Monero
  • Traceability

Metrics

  • Access Statistics
  • Total Accesses (updated on a weekly basis)
    0
    PDF Downloads
    0
    Metadata Views

Supplementary Materials

References

  1. Sina Aeeneh, João Otávio Chervinski, Jiangshan Yu, and Nikola Zlatanov. New attacks on the untraceability of transactions in CryptoNote-style blockchains. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC), pages 1-5, 2021. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBC51069.2021.9461130.
  2. Sherman S. M. Chow, Christoph Egger, Russell W. F. Lai, Ivy K. Y. Woo, and Viktoria Ronge. On sustainable ring-based anonymous systems. In 36th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium, 2023. Google Scholar
  3. Timothy A. Davis. CSparse: A concise sparse matrix package. URL: https://people.engr.tamu.edu/davis/suitesparse.html.
  4. A. L. Dulmage and N. S. Mendelsohn. Coverings of bipartite graphs. Canadian Journal of Mathematics, 10:517-534, 1958. URL: https://doi.org/10.4153/CJM-1958-052-0.
  5. Christoph Egger, Russell W. F. Lai, Viktoria Ronge, Ivy K. Y. Woo, and Hoover H.F. Yin. On defeating graph analysis of anonymous transactions. In Michelle Kerschbaum, Florian; Mazurek, editor, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, volume 2022 (3), pages 538-557, Warschau (Polen), 2022. Sciendo. URL: https://doi.org/10.56553/popets-2022-0085.
  6. Brandon Goodell. Perfect privacy or strong deniability? In Monero Konferenco, 2019. URL: https://youtu.be/xicn4rdUj_Q.
  7. Abraham Hinteregger and Bernhard Haslhofer. An empirical analysis of Monero cross-chain traceability. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security, pages 150-157, 2019. Google Scholar
  8. Amrit Kumar, Clément Fischer, Shruti Tople, and Prateek Saxena. A traceability analysis of Monero’s blockchain. In European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, pages 153-173. Springer, 2017. Google Scholar
  9. Joseph K Liu, Victor K Wei, and Duncan S Wong. Linkable spontaneous anonymous group signature for ad hoc groups. In Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, pages 325-335. Springer, 2004. Google Scholar
  10. L. Lovász and M.D. Plummer. Matching Theory. North-Holland, 1986. Google Scholar
  11. dmperm: MATLAB function for Dulmage-Mendelsohn decomposition. URL: https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/dmperm.html.
  12. Monero Blackball Databases, 2021. Last Accessed: August 13, 2023. URL: https://github.com/monero-blackball/monero-blackball-site.
  13. Monero Blackball Tool Code, 2023. Last Accessed: June 13, 2023. URL: https://github.com/monero-project/monero/blob/master/src/blockchain_utilities/blockchain_blackball.cpp.
  14. Monero Original GitHub Repository, 2018. URL: https://github.com/XmanXU/monero-original.
  15. Monero Scheduled Software Upgrades, 2020. Last Accessed: August 13, 2023. URL: https://github.com/monero-project/monero/#scheduled-software-upgrades.
  16. MoneroV GitHub Repository, 2019. URL: https://github.com/monerov/monerov.
  17. Malte Möser, Kyle Soska, Ethan Heilman, Kevin Lee, Henry Heffan, Shashvat Srivastava, Kyle Hogan, Jason Hennessey, Andrew Miller, Arvind Narayanan, and Nicolas Christin. An empirical analysis of traceability in the Monero blockchain. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2018(3):143-163, 2018. URL: https://doi.org/10.1515/popets-2018-0025.
  18. Joāo Otávio Chervinski, Diego Kreutz, and Jiangshan Yu. Analysis of transaction flooding attacks against Monero. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC), pages 1-8, 2021. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBC51069.2021.9461084.
  19. Alex Pothen and Chin-Ju Fan. Computing the block triangular form of a sparse matrix. ACM Trans. Math. Softw., 16(4):303-324, December 1990. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/98267.98287.
  20. Viktoria Ronge, Christoph Egger, Russell W. F. Lai, Dominique Schröder, and Hoover H.F. Yin. Foundations of ring sampling. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2021:265-288, 2021. URL: https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2021-0047.
  21. Nicolas van Saberhagen. CryptoNote v 2.0. White paper, 2013. URL: https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf.
  22. Dimaz Ankaa Wijaya, Joseph Liu, Ron Steinfeld, and Dongxi Liu. Monero ring attack: Recreating zero mixin transaction effect. In 2018 17th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/ 12th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE), pages 1196-1201, 2018. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TrustCom/BigDataSE.2018.00165.
  23. Dimaz Ankaa Wijaya, Joseph Liu, Ron Steinfeld, Dongxi Liu, and Tsz Hon Yuen. Anonymity reduction attacks to Monero. In Fuchun Guo, Xinyi Huang, and Moti Yung, editors, Information Security and Cryptology, pages 86-100, Cham, 2019. Springer International Publishing. Google Scholar
  24. Dimaz Ankaa Wijaya, Joseph K. Liu, Ron Steinfeld, Dongxi Liu, and Jiangshan Yu. On the unforkability of Monero. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, Asia CCS '19, pages 621-632, New York, NY, USA, 2019. Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3321705.3329823.
  25. J. Yu, M. H. A. Au, and P. Esteves-Verissimo. Re-thinking untraceability in the CryptoNote-style blockchain. In 2019 IEEE 32nd Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), pages 94-106, 2019. URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/CSF.2019.00014.
  26. Zuoxia Yu, Man Ho Au, Jiangshan Yu, Rupeng Yang, Qiuliang Xu, and Wang Fat Lau. New empirical traceability analysis of CryptoNote-style blockchains. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security, pages 133-149, 2019. Google Scholar
Questions / Remarks / Feedback
X

Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing


Thanks for your feedback!

Feedback submitted

Could not send message

Please try again later or send an E-mail
© 2023-2024 Schloss Dagstuhl – LZI GmbH Imprint Privacy Contact