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linkability (open-research-problems): improve and mention practical results #264

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linkability (open-research-problems): improve and mention practical results #264

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linkability (open-research-problems): improve and mention practical r…
dagonharett Jul 1, 2023
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linkability (open-research-problems): it was well known beforehand
dagonharett Apr 12, 2024
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8 changes: 4 additions & 4 deletions open-research-problems.md
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Expand Up @@ -126,13 +126,13 @@ The goal is this research problem is to investigate and develop an asynchronous,

Mimblewimble/Grin leverage [confidential transactions](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confidential_transactions) to hide the identity of the sender and recipients. As such, there are no public amounts or addresses.

However, it is possible for someone listening on the network to build a transaction graph and possibly clustering entities together.
However, it is possible for someone listening on the network to build a transaction graph and possibly cluster entities together. Ivan Bogatyy has shown this attack works in practice, being able to [link 96% of Grin transactions](https://github.com/bogatyy/grin-linkability) broadcasted during the run of his experiment.
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I think this was unfairly labeled as an "attack" in Bogaty's article. This is just a well known way of gathering information that's already public.


Techniques like [Dandelion++](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.11060) mitigate this issue but are insufficient for a privacy coin.
The [Dandelion++](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.11060) inspired transaction propagation technique implemented in Grin was insufficient to mitigate the attack. It successfully hides IP addresses but cannot aggregate enough transaction to obscure the transaction graph. This is insufficient for a privacy coin.
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Dandelion++ is mostly used for obfuscating the source of the transaction. We happen to also aggregate transactions during the stem phase, but I don't think this was intended to sufficiently mitigate collecting the information. It was always well understood that's not sufficient for blind aggregation.


A much more promising design is this Mimblewimble [CoinSwap proposal](https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal)
A much more promising design is the [Mimblewimble CoinSwap proposal](https://forum.grin.mw/t/mimblewimble-coinswap-proposal).

The goal of this research is to investigate ways to obfuscate the Grin transaction and implement such design.
The goal of this research is to investigate ways to obfuscate the Grin transaction graph and implement such design.

### Relevant Papers

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