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I have been logging Monero transactions for over a year now. Main reason why I decided to go public are blatant lies that there is nothing to worry about Chiphertrace and that Monero is private. If you are prepared to sit though an 8 hour lecture on how broken Monero is, you will see that even they admit it. However that's obviously a small percentage of people they sell Monero to.

So what is the point of all this, if you are looking for attention there is a bounty by the The United States Tax Service and they are offering $625,000 if you are able to help them track the transactions, saying that i highly doubt you are able to do that. My best guess is that you have the logs of some website and you are publishing the IP address assuming that they all used Monero  :P.

https://i.imgur.com/zYMU4YO.png
TLDR: Monero was never a real privacy coin. Multiple problems that Ciphertrace (https://ciphertrace.com/ciphertrace-announces-worlds-first-monero-tracing-capabilities/) is currently exploiting (https://github.com/monero-project/monero/issues/1673#issuecomment-312968452) were reported to Monero project in 2016 and remain unfixed since. To draw attention to the issue I will publish transactions, IP addresses and porn preferences of 100 "lucky" Monero users every day.


Have more questions? Have a look at the FAQ page on BADCACA website (https://monero-badcaca.net/).

Check today's 100 users who thought Monero is private on BADCACA!

Do you think Vincent Rijmen exploded with anger when AES was broken? No, he congratulated the authors.

Yes, Monero community is full of lovely, lovely people. And that's not even counting neo-Nazis 😒

Ciphertrace
Ciphertrace
Ciphertrace

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TLDR: Monero was never a real privacy coin. Multiple problems that Ciphertrace (https://ciphertrace.com/ciphertrace-announces-worlds-first-monero-tracing-capabilities/) is currently exploiting (https://github.com/monero-project/monero/issues/1673#issuecomment-312968452) were reported to Monero project in 2016 and remain unfixed since. To draw attention to the issue I will publish transactions, IP addresses and porn preferences of 100 "lucky" Monero users every day.

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Riccardo Spagni Profile picture
Riccardo Spagni
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14h, 17 tweets, 5 min read
Recently, a largely incompetent attacker bumbled their way through a Sybil attack against Monero, trying to correlate transactions to the IP address of the node that broadcast it. Whilst novel in that it is the 1st Sybil attack of this sort, it was also quite ineffective. 1/n
First off, this clumsy attack had no effect on any of Monero's on-chain privacy mechanisms (ring signatures, stealth addresses, confidential transactions). Additionally, it is important to note that this is an attack that you could execute against nearly every cryptocurrency, 2/n
even privacy-focused cryptocurrencies. This makes it of particular interest, not just to Monero, but to all cryptocurrencies. Naturally, as we've all been aware of the possibility there is lots of work that has been done over the years to mitigate it. 3/n
The biggest mitigation is to use Tor or i2p for your node to broadcast its transactions, and this has been easily supported in Monero for 2 years (see: github.com/monero-project…) and in Bitcoin for over 8 years (see: github.com/bitcoin/bitcoi…) 4/n
bitcoin/bitcoin
Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree. Contribute to bitcoin/bitcoin development by creating an account on GitHub.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/tor.md
monero-project/monero
Monero: the secure, private, untraceable cryptocurrency - monero-project/monero
https://github.com/monero-project/monero/blob/master/ANONYMITY_NETWORKS.md
Of course, this isn't a silver bullet, and there are a class of attacks that can still be used to correlate a Tor address with a real-world IP address, & so an excellent group of researchers (Brad Denby, @giuliacfanti, @socrates1024, Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan, & others) 5/n
created Dandelion in 2017 (see: arxiv.org/pdf/1701.04439…). In 2018 they followed it up with Dandelion++ (see: arxiv.org/pdf/1805.11060…) which fixed many of the weaknesses of the original proposal. 6/n
Dandelion (and, by extension, Dandelion++) has been proposed for Bitcoin as BIP-156 (see: github.com/bitcoin/bips/b…), but is not yet implemented. Dandelion++ was implemented in Monero in a PR merged in April this year (see github.com/monero-project…). 7/n
Adding Dandelion++ support to public networks: by vtnerd · Pull Request #6314 · monero-project/monero
New flag in NOTIFY_NEW_TRANSACTION to indicate stem mode Stem loops detected in tx_pool.cpp Embargo timeout for a blackhole attack during stem phase
https://github.com/monero-project/monero/pull/6314
bitcoin/bips
Bitcoin Improvement Proposals. Contribute to bitcoin/bips development by creating an account on GitHub.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0156.mediawiki
Without getting technical, Dandelion++ works by randomly "diffusing" transaction broadcasts. This means that for a Sybil attack to link a transaction to a node's IP address it has to be intercepted at the very first node in the "stem" phase of a Dandelion++ broadcast. 8/n
This attack, whilst novel in that it is a live Sybil attack against a network, was simply not large enough to be broadly effective against Dandelion++ - the attacker would have had to launch many thousands more nodes. 9/n
Even if they did do this, they would still not have been able to demonstrably prove a link between a node and a transaction, and it would be a "best guess" heuristic. Naturally this attack was entirely useless against anyone using a light node (eg. MyMonero), 10/n
against anyone using Tor / i2p for their node, against anyone who runs their node behind a VPN, or against anyone using pushtx on a Monero block explorer to broadcast their transactions. It was also largely useless for anyone using a node remotely (eg. Monerujo or the GUI). 11/n
Still, it did teach us some valuable lessons as the Sybil nodes also tried to disrupt the flow of transactions (by not rebroadcasting them), and tried to disrupt nodes syncing up by not serving them blocks. 12/n
Thus, the latest Monero release (0.17.1.3) has fine-tuned the way a node deals with misbehaving peers. If you are running a Monero or Bitcoin node (or a node for any other currency), it is important to be aware that Sybil attacks can be more subtle & less clumsy than this. 13/n
They can also be much harder to detect in practice if the attacker has enough money to deploy reasonable infrastructure. There has also been purpose-built Sybil node software created for Bitcoin (see: github.com/basil00/Pseudo…) that actually behaves pretty well. 14/n
basil00/PseudoNode
PseudoNode - A full node emulator. Contribute to basil00/PseudoNode development by creating an account on GitHub.
https://github.com/basil00/PseudoNode
They do this without even requiring much in the way of server resources (eg. by proxying block requests through to another peer), and thus fully support initial sync, transaction broadcasts, and so on. They are a little diabolical in their ability to masquerade as a node. 15/n
If you are truly concerned about the efficacy of a Sybil attack (whether you're a Bitcoin or a Monero user) then I strongly recommend you run your node behind Tor, or at least broadcast your transactions on a block explorer's pushtx functionality (also accessible via Tor). 16/fin
Bootnote: here's a Reddit thread on the attack, which also includes a link to a flat file of the attacker's IP addresses that you can pass to --ban-list if you want to make sure your node doesn't connect to these.

Main reason why I decided to go public are blatant lies that there is nothing to worry about Chiphertrace and that Monero is private.

My first thought is, “Whose IP addresses are those supposed to be?  The originating nodes’?  Contra what it says in the badcaca FAQ, Dandelion++ would make it easy to mistake the IP address of the originating node.”

How are you tracking people's IP addresses? Didn't Monero implement Dandelion++ to prevent that?

Similarly to Monero, Dandelion++ is only private on paper.

This is harmful to innocent bystanders (as well as people who are having their privacy (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5284102.0) invaded for watching legal kinky porn—if any of these listings are correct, which I would not assume!).  It is defamatory to anyone whose IP is incorrectly listed, among other things.

I hope no-one is stupid enough...

Monero lost its reputation a very long time ago. Just imagine people having your IP addresses along with which sites you visited or where specifically you purchased something is quite frightening for those that thought they were dealing with a privacy based coin. I checked the link (https://monero-badcaca.net/) it does not look good for Monero as a privacy coin and it does not look good for those 100 user details that will be published daily  :o

https://i.imgur.com/zYMU4YO.png
TLDR: Monero was never a real privacy coin. Multiple problems that Ciphertrace (https://ciphertrace.com/ciphertrace-announces-worlds-first-monero-tracing-capabilities/) is currently exploiting (https://github.com/monero-project/monero/issues/1673#issuecomment-312968452) were reported to Monero project in 2016 and remain unfixed since. To draw attention to the issue I will publish transactions, IP addresses and porn preferences of 100 "lucky" Monero users every day.


Have more questions? Have a look at the FAQ page on BADCACA website (https://monero-badcaca.net/).

Check today's 100 users who thought Monero is private on BADCACA!

If your tansaction is waiting for a few minutes in the mempool, badcaca node got it.

his is not the right way to go about publicizing this data.

Why can you only catch transactions that were waiting for a few minutes in mempool? Admittedly I don't know a whole lot about dandelion but I would think you're just recording the first node to broadcast a TX here.

Why not? They have already shown they are prepared to lie about it.

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You are confusing cause and effect here. Transaction sitting in node's mempool is caused by it being intercepted and then rebroadcast.

But for all we know there are whistleblowers buying VPNs or domains, and you're putting out IP address data which could be used in combination with other methods to identify those people.

I think we might be talking about different mempools? I meant the public transaction mempool

This argument can be very easily turned around. For people like that, isn't it better to know they have been exposed? Monero is perfectly happy for them to be tracked by Ciphertrace while reassuring them that all is fine.

There is no such thing as a public mempool on a p2p network level. What you are seeing on the website is a snapshot of one node's mempool. The way dandelion++ works is that the transaction will be put into the original node's mempool, broadcast in stem phase, and if the node doesn't see it again, it will be broadcast in fluff phase. The "not seeing it again" part is the cause of the delay.

I'm posting the daily report in Monero topic until they start moderating it.

This argument can be very easily turned around. For people like that, isn't it better to know they have been exposed? Monero is perfectly happy for them to be tracked by Ciphertrace while reassuring them that all is fine.

I know investing can be difficult for some people, they invest more than they are willing to lose and can become emotionally involved in the projects they back. Maybe you should consider analyzing your position, frankly and without emotion, and move on.

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I'm looking forward to seeing some evidence behind these claims.

Simple. Use Monero, find out if you are on the list.

I suggest reading the paper.

[...]


Based on a reasonable inference of what you seem to be suggesting that you are trying to do:  The Dandelion++ authors were way ahead of you.  That is an admittedly low standard, because you don’t know what the hell you are doing.  You are listing the IP addresses of random peers, exactly as I said!

§4.4 at p. 17 of the Dandelion++ paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.11060) speaks thusly:

https://i.imgur.com/U3uD6gS.png

If you claim to be defeating Dandelion++’s random timers, then please show your work with maths and stuff.  (LOL, as if.)

dragonvslinux, I think that by now it’s obvious that badcaca has nothing except s’kiddie-tier bragging, bluffing, and spamming the shit out of this forum with long lists of txids, randomly selected peer IPs, and annotations of what are probably just his own porn fantasies.