【Author】
Wijaya, Dimaz Ankaa; Liu, Joseph K.; Steinfeld, Ron; Liu, Dongxi
【Source】INFORMATION SECURITY AND PRIVACY, ACISP 2021
【Abstract】Monero is a cryptocurrency that provides anonymity by default for its senders and receivers. The recorded Monero transactions are infeasible to trace without additional information. Monero utilises Proof-of-Work (PoW) as its consensus method. Miners contribute their computing power in exchange for a reward. To stabilise their income, the miners join mining pools. Mining pools coordinate the miners' mining power in order to generate more reward and distribute the reward based on each miner's contribution to getting the reward. Some mining pools publish the list of won blocks and payout transactions to the miners to provide transparency of their business. In this work, we investigate anonymity leak in Monero system through analyses on mining pools' data. We collect published data from ten mining pools' websites and conduct traceability analyses on the data. We discover that 59.2% inputs of all Monero transaction inputs in our data set are traceable. We also identify that the age of the spent coins is between 2.5 h and 3.3 days. While we propose methods to improve the accountability of the published information, it is also questionable that the mining pools keep publishing such information which reduces the anonymity of their transactions. Our investigation shows that there is no relationship between publishing mining-related information and the success of a mining pool.
【Keywords】Monero; Mining pool; Traceability; Miners
【标题】透明还是匿名性泄漏：Monero矿池数据公开
【摘要】Monero是一种加密货币，默认情况下为其发送者和接收者提供匿名性。记录的Monero交易在没有额外信息的情况下无法追踪。Monero使用工作证明（PoW）作为其共识方法。矿工们贡献他们的计算能力来换取奖励。为了稳定收入，矿工们加入了采矿池。采矿池协调矿工的采矿能力，以产生更多的奖励，并根据每个矿工对获得奖励的贡献来分配奖励。一些采矿池向矿工公布赢得的区块和付款交易清单，以提供其业务的透明度。在这项工作中，我们通过分析挖掘池的数据来研究Monero系统中的匿名泄漏。我们从十个矿池的网站上收集已发布的数据，并对数据进行可追溯性分析。我们发现，在我们的数据集中，所有Monero交易输入中有59.2%的输入是可跟踪的。我们还发现，花费的硬币的年龄在2.5小时到3.3天之间。虽然我们提出了改进已发布信息的匿名性的方法，但采矿池是否继续发布此类信息也值得怀疑，因为这会降低其交易的匿名性。我们的调查表明，发布采矿相关信息与采矿池的成功无关。
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