Paper 2017/881

Möbius: Trustless Tumbling for Transaction Privacy

Sarah Meiklejohn and Rebekah Mercer

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies allow users to securely transfer money without relying on a trusted intermediary, and the transparency of their underlying ledgers also enables public verifiability. This openness, however, comes at a cost to privacy, as even though the pseudonyms users go by are not linked to their real-world identities, all movement of money among these pseudonyms is traceable. In this paper, we present Möbius, an Ethereum-based tumbler or mixing service. Möbius achieves strong notions of anonymity, as even malicious senders cannot identify which pseudonyms belong to the recipients to whom they sent money, and is able to resist denial-of-service attacks. It also achieves a much lower off-chain communication complexity than all existing tumblers, with senders and recipients needing to send only two initial messages in order to engage in an arbitrary number of transactions.

Note: full version

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. PETS 2018
Keywords
anonymitycryptocurrencies
Contact author(s)
rebekah @ cs au dk
History
2018-01-02: revised
2017-09-17: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/881
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/881,
      author = {Sarah Meiklejohn and Rebekah Mercer},
      title = {Möbius: Trustless Tumbling for Transaction Privacy},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2017/881},
      year = {2017},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/881}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/881}
}
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