Paper 2021/760

Analysis of CryptoNote Transaction Graphs using the Dulmage-Mendelsohn Decomposition

Saravanan Vijayakumaran, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
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 Möser 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.

Note: Major revision. Added links to code and instructions to reproduce empirical results.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. AFT 2023
Keywords
CryptoNoteMoneroRingCTlinkable ring signatures
Contact author(s)
sarva @ ee iitb ac in
History
2023-08-12: last of 2 revisions
2021-06-07: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2021/760
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/760,
      author = {Saravanan Vijayakumaran},
      title = {Analysis of {CryptoNote} Transaction Graphs using the Dulmage-Mendelsohn Decomposition},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/760},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/760}
}
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