Is Monero Totally Private? A Comprehensive Analysis of De-Anonymization Attacks

[CryptoBullFLA]

Monero (XMR), a cryptocurrency renowned for its privacy-centric design, has drawn the attention of governments, cybersecurity experts, and analytics firms seeking to deanonymize its transactions. Unlike Bitcoin, where transactions are publicly visible on the blockchain, Monero employs sophisticated privacy features such as ring signatures, stealth addresses, and confidential transactions. This article analyzes notable attempts to compromise Monero’s privacy, detailing the methodologies used, their efficacy, and their limitations.

Monero’s Privacy Features: A Brief Overview

To appreciate the challenges of deanonymizing Monero, it is essential to understand its privacy architecture:

Ring Signatures: Combine a sender’s output with decoy outputs, obscuring the true origin of a transaction.
Stealth Addresses: Generate unique one-time addresses for recipients, ensuring transactions cannot be linked back to a public address.
Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT): Conceal transaction amounts.
Dandelion++ Protocol: Helps obscure the origin of transactions during network propagation.
These features collectively create a blockchain that is opaque by design, frustrating conventional blockchain analysis techniques.

1. Chainalysis and Monero Tracking Services

Attempt: Chainalysis, a prominent blockchain analytics company, has been reported to develop tools capable of providing some insights into Monero transactions. While specifics are scarce due to the proprietary nature of their methods, Chainalysis has publicly acknowledged limited success with Monero tracking.

Methodology: Their approach likely involves exploiting known vulnerabilities, such as timing analysis of transactions or correlating off-chain data (e.g., exchange deposits and withdrawals).

Efficacy: Limited. Chainalysis’s methods have reportedly provided probabilistic results rather than deterministic deanonymization. For example, law enforcement contracts suggest they may only achieve partial success in scenarios where Monero interacts with non-private cryptocurrencies or centralized exchanges.


MORE: Is Monero Totally Private? A Comprehensive Analysis of De-Anonymization Attacks Against The Privacy Coin.

[NeuroticFish]

1. This has to be moved to altcoin discussions.
2. Chainanalysis boasted this many years ago, it's an old news. The success is *very* limited and afaik only in certain weak setup.
3. I've read that Monero was preparing to deploy a way to make it even harder to track transactions: instead of 8 parts (7 decoys) in a tx, now the entire blockchain will be in theory a decoy for the tx.

I don't know well enough the details, but it worth researching imho.

[CryptoBullFLA]

3. I've read that Monero was preparing to deploy a way to make it even harder to track transactions: instead of 8 parts (7 decoys) in a tx, now the entire blockchain will be in theory a decoy for the tx

Can you please point me to somewhere I can read about that?