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Deanonymizing Transactions Originating from Monero Tor Hidden Service Nodes

Published: 13 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Monero is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that incorporates anonymity networks (such as Tor and I2P) and deploys the Dandelion++ protocol to prevent malicious attackers from linking transactions with their source IPs. However, this paper highlights a vulnerability in Monero's integration of the Tor network, which allows an attacker to successfully deanonymize transactions originating from Monero Tor hidden service nodes at the network-layer level.
Our approach involves injecting malicious Monero Tor hidden service nodes into the Monero P2P network to correlate the onion addresses of incoming Monero Tor hidden service peers with their originating transactions. And by sending a signal watermark embedded with the onion address to the Tor circuit, we establish a correlation between the onion address and IP address of a Monero Tor hidden service node. Ultimately, we correlate transactions and IPs of Monero Tor hidden service nodes.
Through experimentation on the Monero testnet, we provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of our approach in successfully deanonymizing transactions originating from Monero Tor hidden service nodes.

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References

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Maria Apostolaki, Cedric Maire, and Laurent Vanbever. 2021. Perimeter:Anetworklayer attack on the anonymity of cryptocurrencies. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security: 25th International Conference, FC 2021, Virtual Event, March 1--5, 2021, Revised Selected Papers, Part I 25. Springer, 147--166.
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Alex Biryukov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Ivan Pustogarov. 2014. Deanonymisation of clients in bitcoin p2p network. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security. 15--29.
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Alex Biryukov and Ivan Pustogarov. 2015. Bitcoin over Tor isn't a Good Idea. In 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 122--134. https://doi.org/10.1109/ SP.2015.15
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Yue Gao, Jinqiao Shi, Xuebin Wang, Ruisheng Shi, Can Zhao, and Chenglong Li. 2021. A Two-Stage Deanonymization Attack Towards Bitcoin Hidden Service Nodes. In 2021 IEEE 23rd Int Conf on High Performance Computing & Communications; 7th Int Conf on Data Science & Systems; 19th Int Conf on Smart City; 7th Int Conf on Dependability in Sensor, Cloud & Big Data Systems & Application (HPCC/DSS/SmartCity/DependSys). IEEE, 543--550.
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  1. Deanonymizing Transactions Originating from Monero Tor Hidden Service Nodes

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WWW '24: Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024
    May 2024
    1928 pages
    ISBN:9798400701726
    DOI:10.1145/3589335
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 13 May 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. cryptocurrency
    2. monero
    3. tor network
    4. transaction deanonymization

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    • Short-paper

    Funding Sources

    • the Beijing Natural Science Foundation
    • the National Key Research and Development Plan

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    WWW '24
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    WWW '24: The ACM Web Conference 2024
    May 13 - 17, 2024
    Singapore, Singapore

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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