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MoneroResearch.info |
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Christensen, S. 2018. A Comparative Study of Privacy-Preserving Cryptocurrencies: Monero and ZCash. University of Birmingham. Added by: Jack (18/01/2023, 00:59) Last edited by: Jack (20/01/2023, 17:36) |
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| Resource type: Unpublished Work BibTeX citation key: Christensen2018 View all bibliographic details  |
Categories: Monero-focused Creators: Christensen Publisher: University of Birmingham |
Views: 82/2198
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Attachments
a comparative study monero zcash.pdf  [14/602]
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URLs https://www.dgalin ... projects/sofie.pdf |
| Abstract |
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Since it was discovered that Bitcoin offers limited privacy, many cryptocurrencies have emerged implementing privacy-enhancing cryptographic technologies including the use of ring signatures and zk-SNARKs. Two of the most popular cryptocurrencies using these techniques respectively are Monero and Zcash. A study has been conducted to identify the different cryptographic primitives used to achieve privacy in Monero and Zcash and to offer a direct comparison of both. The study shows that the implementation of privacy enhancing cryptographic primitives introduces new limitations to the protocols in terms of usability and efficiency. These limitations are critically assessed and evaluated. Monero was identified to be vulnerable to two attacks that could compromise privacy. The first attack shows that transactions can be de-anonymised due to the limited number of mixins chosen for the ring signature. The second attack shows that it is possible to correctly guess which mixin the real input is the majority of the time. Based on these vulnerabilities, three improvements are suggested and tested. The first is a different ring signature scheme that allows for constant sized transactions. It was shown that this scheme offers a viable solution to incentivise the use of more mixins. The second is a different sampling algorithm that increases the effective untraceability of the real input. The implementation resulted in better effective untraceability than what is currently achieved by Monero. Finally, a more secure stealth address generation algorithm is presented and implemented. This study critically assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed improvement.
Added by: Jack Last edited by: Jack |
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The project was uploaded on the gitlab repository. To download the project please run git clone https://git-teaching.cs.bham.ac.uk/mod-msc-proj-2017/sxc1058 |