misc-research/Monero-Black-Marble-Flood/pdf/monero-black-marble-flood.bib

@article{Aguado2010,
author = {Aguado, J. and Cid, C. and Saiz, E. and Cerrato, Y.},
title = {Hyperbolic decay of the Dst Index during the recovery phase of intense geomagnetic storms},
journal = {Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics},
volume = {115},
number = {A7},
pages = {},
keywords = {Dst index, recovery phase, magnetosphere},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1029/2009JA014658},
url = {https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2009JA014658},
eprint = {https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2009JA014658},
abstract = {What one commonly considers for reproducing the recovery phase of magnetosphere, as seen by the Dst index, is exponential function. However, the magnetosphere recovers faster in the first hours than in the late recovery phase. The early steepness followed by the late smoothness in the magnetospheric response is a feature that leads to the proposal of a hyperbolic decay function to reproduce the recovery phase instead of the exponential function. A superposed epoch analysis of recovery phases of intense storms from 1963 to 2003 was performed, categorizing the storms by their intensity into five subsets. The hyperbolic decay function reproduces experimental data better than what the exponential function does for any subset of storms, which indicates a nonlinear coupling between dDst/dt and Dst. Moreover, this kind of mathematical function, where the degree of reduction of the Dst index depends on time, allows for explaining different lifetimes of the physical mechanisms involved in the recovery phase and provides new insights for the modeling of the Dst index.},
year = {2010}
}


@misc{Noether2014,
	title = {A Note on Chain Reactions in Traceability in CryptoNote 2.0},
	number = {1},
	year = {2014},
	URL = {https://www.getmonero.org/resources/research-lab/pubs/MRL-0001.pdf},
	booktitle = {Monero Research Lab},
	author = {Noether, Surae and Noether, Sarang and Mackenzie, Adam},
	abstract = {This research bulletin describes a plausible attack on a ring-signature based anonymity system. We use as motivation the cryptocurrency protocol CryptoNote 2.0 ostensibly published by Nicolas van Saberhagen in 2012. It has been previously demonstrated that the untraceability obscuring a one-time key pair can be dependent upon the untraceability of all of the keys used in composing that ring signature. This allows for the possibility of chain reactions in traceability between ring signatures, causing a critical loss in untraceability across the whole network if parameters are poorly chosen and if an attacker owns a sufficient percentage of the network. The signatures are still one-time, however, and any such attack will still not necessarily violate the anonymity of users. However, such an attack could plausibly weaken the resistance CryptoNote demonstrates against blockchain analysis. This research bulletin has not undergone peer review, and reflects only the results of internal investigation.},
	howpublished = {Research Bulletin},
}

@inproceedings{Chervinski2021,
	title = {Analysis of transaction flooding attacks against Monero},
	DOI = {10.1109/ICBC51069.2021.9461084},
	year = {2021},
	URL = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9461084},
	booktitle = {2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency (ICBC)},
	pages = {1--8},
	author = {Chervinski, Ot{\'a}vio Jo{\~a}o and Kreutz, Diego and Yu, Jiangshan},
	abstract = {Monero was one of the first cryptocurrencies to address the problem of providing privacy-preserving digital asset trading. Currently, it has a market capitalization of over 2.5 billion US dollars and is among the 15 most valuable cryptocurrencies. This digital currency aims to protect users' identities and hide transaction information by using obfuscation mechanisms such as stealth addresses and ring signatures. However, in spite of the efforts to protect Monero's users' privacy, researchers have found ways to identify true payment keys within a ring signature in the past, making attacks against transaction privacy feasible. Since then, the system has received updates and adopted improved measures to provide privacy. This work presents an analysis on how an attacker can take advantage of the system's current settings to conduct both a high-profile transaction flooding attack and a stealthier version. Our results show that after flooding the network for 12 months, the attacker can identify the true spend of 46.24{\%} of newly created transaction inputs by conducting the strongest attack and 14.47{\%} by using the low-profile strategy.},
}


@misc{Krawiec-Thayer2021,
	title = "Fingerprinting a flood: forensic statistical analysis of the mid-2021 Monero transaction volume anomaly",
	year = "2021",
	URL = "https://mitchellpkt.medium.com/fingerprinting-a-flood-forensic-statistical-analysis-of-the-mid-2021-monero-transaction-volume-a19cbf41ce60",
	author = "Krawiec-Thayer, Mitchell P. and Neptune and Rucknium and Jberman and Carrington",
	note = "Available at https://mitchellpkt.medium.com/fingerprinting-a-flood-forensic-statistical-analysis-of-the-mid-2021-monero-transaction-volume-a19cbf41ce60"
}

@misc{Rucknium2023a,
	title = "Closed-form Expression of Monero's wallet2 Decoy Selection Algorithm",
	year = "2023",
	URL = "https://github.com/Rucknium/misc-research/tree/main//Monero-Decoy-Selection-Closed-Form/pdf",
	author = "Rucknium",
	note = "Available at https://github.com/Rucknium/misc-research/tree/main//Monero-Decoy-Selection-Closed-Form/pdf"
}



@article{Ronge2021,
	title = "Foundations of Ring Sampling",
	DOI = "doi:10.2478/popets-2021-0047",
	volume = "2021",
	number = "3",
	year = "2021",
	URL = "https://doi.org/10.2478/popets-2021-0047",
	journal = "Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies",
	pages = "265--288",
	author = "Ronge, Viktoria and Egger, Christoph and Lai, Russell W. F. and Schr{\"o}der, Dominique and Yin, Hoover H. F.",
	abstract = "A ring signature scheme allows the signer to sign on behalf of an ad hoc set of users, called a ring. The verifier can be convinced that a ring member signs, but cannot point to the exact signer. Ring signatures have become increasingly important today with their deployment in anonymous cryptocurrencies. Conventionally, it is implicitly assumed that all ring members are equally likely to be the signer. This assumption is generally false in reality, leading to various practical and devastating deanonymizing attacks in Monero, one of the largest anonymous cryptocurrencies. These attacks highlight the unsatisfactory situation that how a ring should be chosen is poorly understood.We propose an analytical model of ring samplers towards a deeper understanding of them through systematic studies. Our model helps to describe how anonymous a ring sampler is with respect to a given signer distribution as an information-theoretic measure. We show that this measure is robust ? it only varies slightly when the signer distribution varies slightly. We then analyze three natural samplers ? uniform, mimicking, and partitioning ? under our model with respect to a family of signer distributions modeled after empirical Bitcoin data. We hope that our work paves the way towards researching ring samplers from a theoretical point of view.",
}


@article{Egger2022,
	title = "On Defeating Graph Analysis of Anonymous Transactions",
	volume = "2022",
	number = "3",
	year = "2022",
	URL = "https://petsymposium.org/2022/files/papers/issue3/popets-2022-0085.pdf",
	journal = "Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies",
	author = "Egger, Christoph and Lai, Russell W. F. and Ronge, Viktoria and Woo, Ivy K. Y. and Yin, Hoover H. F.",
	abstract = "In a ring-signature-based anonymous cryptocurrency, signers of a transaction are hidden among a set of potential signers, called a ring, whose size is much smaller than the number of all users. The ring-membership relations specified by the sets of transactions thus induce bipartite transaction graphs, whose distribution is in turn induced by the ring sampler underlying the cryptocurrency.Since efficient graph analysis could be performed on transaction graphs to potentially deanonymise signers, it is crucial to understand the resistance of (the transaction graphs induced by) a ring sampler against graph analysis. Of particular interest is the class of partitioning ring samplers. Although previous works showed that they provide almost optimal local anonymity, their resistance against global, e.g. graph-based, attacks were unclear.In this work, we analyse transaction graphs induced by partitioning ring samplers. Specifically, we show (partly analytically and partly empirically) that, somewhat surprisingly, by setting the ring size to be at least logarithmic in the number of users, a graph-analysing adversary is no better than the one that performs random guessing in deanonymisation up to constant factor of 2.",
}


@inproceedings{Yu2019a,
	title = "New Empirical Traceability Analysis of CryptoNote-Style Blockchains",
	ISBN = "978-3-030-32101-7",
	year = "2019",
	URL = "https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-32101-7_9",
	booktitle = "Financial Cryptography and Data Security",
	pages = "133--149",
	author = "Yu, Zuoxia and Au, Man Ho and Yu, Jiangshan and Yang, Rupeng and Xu, Qiuliang and Lau, Wang Fat",
	editor = "Goldberg, Ian and Moore, Tyler",
	abstract = "The cascade effect attacks (PETS' 18) on the untraceability of Monero are circumvented by two approaches. The first one is to increase the minimum ring size of each input, from 3 (version 0.9.0) to 7 in the latest update (version 0.12.0). The second approach is introducing the ring confidential transactions with enhanced privacy guarantee. However, so far, no formal analysis has been conducted on the level of anonymity provided by the new countermeasures in Monero. In addition, since Monero is only an example of leading CryptoNote-style blockchains, the actual privacy guarantee provided by other similar blockchains in the wild remains unknown.",
	publisher = "Springer International Publishing"
}

@inproceedings{Vijayakumaran2023,
	title = "Analysis of CryptoNote Transaction Graphs using the Dulmage-Mendelsohn Decomposition",
	ISBN = "978-3-95977-303-4",
	series = "Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)",
	volume = "282",
	year = "2023",
	URL = "https://aftconf.github.io/aft23/program.html",
	booktitle = "5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023)",
	author = "Vijayakumaran, Saravanan",
	editor = "Bonneau, Joseph and Weinberg, Matthew S.",
	abstract = "CryptoNote blockchains like Monero represent the largest public deployments of linkable ring signatures. Beginning with the work of Kumar et al. (ESORICS 2017) and M{\"o}ser et al. (PoPETs 2018), several techniques have been proposed to trace CryptoNote transactions, i.e. identify the actual signing key, by using the transaction history. Yu et al. (FC 2019) introduced the closed set attack for undeniable traceability and proved that it is optimal by showing that it has the same performance as the brute-force attack. However, they could only implement an approximation of the closed set attack due to its exponential time complexity. In this paper, we show that the Dulmage-Mendelsohn (DM) decomposition of bipartite graphs gives a polynomial-time implementation of the closed set attack. Our contribution includes open source implementations of the DM decomposition and the clustering algorithm (the approximation to the closed set attack proposed by Yu et al). Using these implementations, we evaluate the empirical performance of these methods on the Monero dataset in two ways -- firstly using data only from the main Monero chain and secondly using data from four hard forks of Monero in addition to the main Monero chain. We have released the scripts used to perform the empirical analysis along with step-by-step instructions.",
	publisher = "Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{{"}u}r Informatik"
}

@misc{Sharma2022,
	title = "On the Anonymity of Peer-To-Peer Network Anonymity Schemes Used by Cryptocurrencies",
	DOI = "10.48550/ARXIV.2201.11860",
	year = "2022",
	URL = "https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11860",
	author = "Sharma, Piyush Kumar and Gosain, Devashish and Diaz, Claudia",
	abstract = "Cryptocurrency systems can be subject to deanonimization attacks by exploiting the network-level communication on their peer-to-peer network. Adversaries who control a set of colluding node(s) within the peer-to-peer network can observe transactions being exchanged and infer the parties involved. Thus, various network anonymity schemes have been proposed to mitigate this problem, with some solutions providing theoretical anonymity guarantees.In this work, we model such peer-to-peer network anonymity solutions and evaluate their anonymity guarantees. To do so, we propose a novel framework that uses Bayesian inference to obtain the probability distributions linking transactions to their possible originators. We characterize transaction anonymity with those distributions, using entropy as metric of adversarial uncertainty on the originator's identity. In particular, we model Dandelion, Dandelion++ and Lightning Network. We study different configurations and demonstrate that none of them offers acceptable anonymity to their users. For instance, our analysis reveals that in the widely deployed Lightning Network, with 1{\%} strategically chosen colluding nodes the adversary can uniquely determine the originator for about 50{\%} of the total transactions in the network. In Dandelion, an adversary that controls 15{\%} of the nodes has on average uncertainty among only 8 possible originators. Moreover, we observe that due to the way Dandelion and Dandelion++ are designed, increasing the network size does not correspond to an increase in the anonymity set of potential originators. Alarmingly, our longitudinal analysis of Lightning Network reveals rather an inverse trend -- with the growth of the network the overall anonymity decreases.",
	publisher = "arXiv",
	howpublished = "",
	keywords = "Cryptography and Security (cs.CR),FOS: Computer and information sciences"
}