On the unforkability of Monero

Dimaz Ankaa Wijaya, Joseph K. Liu, Ron Steinfeld, Dongxi Liu, Jiangshan Yu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference PaperResearchpeer-review

16 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Monero, ranked as one of the top privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies by market cap, introduced semi-annual hard fork in 2018. Although hard fork is not an uncommon event in the cryptocurrency industry, the two hard forks in 2018 caused an anonymity risk to Monero where transactions became traceable due to the problem of key reuse. This problem was triggered by the existence of multiple copies of the same coin on different Monero blockchain branches such that the users spent the coins multiple times without
preemptive action. We investigate the Monero hard fork events by analysing the transaction data on three different branches of the Monero blockchain. Although we have discovered an insignificant portion of traceable inputs compared to the total available inputs in our dataset, our analyses show that the scalability of the event depends on external factors such as market price and market availability. We propose a cheap, easy to implement strategy to prevent the problem of key reuse, should in the future stronger Monero
forks emerge in the market.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2019 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security
EditorsDieter Gollmann, Engin Kirda, Zhenkai Liang
Place of PublicationNew York NY USA
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages621-632
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781450367523
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019
EventACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security 2019 - Auckland, New Zealand
Duration: 7 Jul 201912 Jul 2019
Conference number: 14th
https://asiaccs2019.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/
https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3321705

Conference

ConferenceACM Symposium on Information, Computer and Communications Security 2019
Abbreviated titleAsiaCCS 2019
Country/TerritoryNew Zealand
CityAuckland
Period7/07/1912/07/19
Internet address

Keywords

  • Anonymity
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Hard fork
  • Key reuse
  • Monero
  • Ring signature
  • Traceability

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