Monero Less Untraceable Than It Seems
March 29th, 2018Via: Wired:
Monero is designed to mix up any given Monero “coin” with other payments, so that anyone scouring Monero’s blockchain can’t link it to any particular identity or previous transaction from the same source. But in a recent paper, a team of researchers from a broad collection of institutions—including Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Boston University, MIT, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—point to flaws in that mixing that make it possible to nonetheless extract individual transactions.
That shouldn’t just worry anyone trying to stealthily spend Monero today. It also means evidence of earlier not-quite-untraceable payments remain carved into Monero’s blockchain for years to come, visible for any snoop that cares to look.
