Analysis of transaction flooding attacks against Monero

Monero was one of the first cryptocurrencies to address the problem of providing privacy-preserving digital asset trading. Currently, it has a market capitalization of over 2.5 billion US dollars and is among the 15 most valuable cryptocurrencies. This digital currency aims to protect users' identities and hide transaction information by using obfuscation mechanisms such as stealth addresses and ring signatures. However, in spite of the efforts to protect Monero's users' privacy, researchers have found ways to identify true payment keys within a ring signature in the past, making attacks against transaction privacy feasible. Since then, the system has received updates and adopted improved measures to provide privacy. This work presents an analysis on how an attacker can take advantage of the system's current settings to conduct both a high-profile transaction flooding attack and a stealthier version. Our results show that after flooding the network for 12 months, the attacker can identify the true spend of 46.24% of newly created transaction inputs by conducting the strongest attack and 14.47% by using the low-profile strategy.