US Homeland Security Can Now Track Privacy Crypto Monero

[jamesd at echeque.com]

On 2020-09-01 11:31, jim bell wrote:
> https://decrypt.co/40284/us-homeland-security-can-now-track-privacy-crypto-monero
> 
> 
> Jim Bell's comment:   I don't know if this is true, but true or not, we need to learn the truth.
>               Jim Bell
> 
> |  | Virus-free. www.avast.com  |

I have examined Monero's security.

I did not find a way to break it, but it failed to inspire me
with confidence.

There are lots of cryptographers vastly better than I am, but they
tend to suffer from the mighty unbreakable fortress wall syndrome.
They build crypto that is utterly unbreakable against the threat
as defined, and all the ways around their unbreakable wall are
declared to be out of scope.

And there are lots of cryptographers, me being one of them, who
are aware of the fact that you need walls on all sides, but are
apt to screw up the crypto.  Monero struck me as being of even
less than my own regrettable level of cryptographic competence,
(I would not have fucked up over non prime order elliptic points)
and somewhat less than my level of awareness of the need for walls
to properly link up with each other.

The problem with Monaro, is that though it avoids the direct linking
of transactions that bitcoin suffers from, it leaks a whole lot of
data about networks of people transacting with each other, and I
suspect that some of the time, the data that it does leak is
sufficient to make a pretty good guess of what is going on behind
the mighty fortress walls of cryptography, that sometimes it
is bulletproof, and sometimes the bullets get through.

I don't think anyone has broken it - I certainly could not -
but I expect that the adversaries are making efficient use of
what it does leak - that they can find interesting information in
what is out of scope of its security model.

I favor Wasabi wallet, which mingles your bitcoins with those of a
large number of other people.

The Lightning network solves the problem that bitcoin has of
transaction linkability, but you then have the correspondence
banking problem, that too many "trusted" intermediaries know
who is transacting with whom.

There is a flaw in the human user interface of the Lightning
network's system of trust.  We need a Lightning network that
has less need for trust, and a human interface that is more human,
so you know whom you are trusting.