ZcashFoundation / GrantProposals-2018Q2

Submission site for 2018Q2 Zcash Foundation grant proposals.
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A statistical analysis of privacy in (private) cryptocurrencies #27

Closed rbkhmrcr closed 6 years ago

rbkhmrcr commented 6 years ago

Motivation and overview

By applying clustering techniques and finding patterns in real-world use of both Zcash and Monero, researchers have been able to determine links between even supposedly private transactions. The anonymity that these users may have thought they were getting and the anonymity they actually achieved are at odds. Also, the future actions of other users have the potential to influence the anonymity of transactions made by users who followed the protocol exactly as they should.

We'd like to extend this research further to find out in what circumstances this still applies, and whether it can be circumvented with, for example, fine-tuned algorithms to select the distribution of inputs or even the timing of transactions, in order to make the ecosystem as a whole more difficult to learn from.

Technical approach

We plan to do this by studying the transaction distributions in both Zcash and Monero, creating simulations to see what sampling techniques work best with real-world use, and presenting these results to the community in a way that can be learnt from and built upon.

Team background and qualifications

Team:

Evaluation plan

Success in this case will take the form of an academic research paper, and tools to better reason about the concrete levels of anonymity achieved (and achievable) by a cryptocurrency.

Security considerations

If our findings impact the anonymity achieved by private transactions, we will responsibly disclose them to the appropriate parties prior to publication, so that users have the opportunity to move their coins before we reveal any information.

Schedule

Budget and justification

The grant money would go towards covering the costs associated with research, including computing power to analyse the existing blockchains and transaction distributions and simulate alternative transaction/public key selection distributions.

We expect to spend several months in total researching and implementing clustering techniques; constructing and implementing the simulator; considering how better to define anonymity in cryptocurrencies so it can capture what we have learned.

Email address(es) for direct contact

bekah at cs dot au dot dk

tromer commented 6 years ago

The Zcash Foundation Grant Review committee has reviewed your pre-proposal, including the above discussion, to evaluate its potential and competitiveness relative to other proposals. Every pre-proposal was evaluated by at least 3 (and typically more than 4) committee members .

The committee's opinion is that your pre-proposal is a promising candidate funding in this round, and the committee therefore invites you to submit a full proposal. Please submit a full proposal by June 15th, following the detailed structure described in the Call for Proposals. We encourage you to submit a draft as early as possible, to allow for community feedback.

tromer commented 6 years ago

We have not received your full submission here by yesterday's deadline. Do you mean to withdraw your proposal?

rbkhmrcr commented 6 years ago

@tromer Yep, sorry if I was supposed to leave a note/comment saying so -- we're still planning on carrying out the project, but I don't have the capacity to make a document with the full proposal at the moment, and its existence doesn't seem too funding dependent. I'm excited to see everything else that's built with the grant money! :)

tromer commented 6 years ago

@bekahoxoo, thanks for the update, and I'm very glad to hear you'll carry out this project. If there's some way the Zcash Foundation can support this research or its publication in the future, please contact @acityinohio or me.