New Vulnerabilities in Algorithms of Anonymity of Zcash Cryptocurrency Have Been Detected
Anonymity of the cryptocurrency Zcash has vulnerabilities. This is indicated by some patterns in the implementation of transactional operations. This was reported by researchers from the University College of London: George Kappos, Haaroon Yousaf, Mary Maller and Sarah Meiklejohn.
The researchers claim that 69.1% of confidentiality is lost as the coins move from "unprotected" to "protected" recipients and to their original location.
We remind you that Zcash is considered a promising anonymous cryptocurrency, which has two types of addresses: "T-addresses" are transparent and unprotected, balances on them and transactions with their participation are publicly available; and protected "Z-addresses", which have no universal available access. Transactions between T-addresses are almost completely public, and the ones between Z-addresses have a high degree of anonymity.
Experts note a decrease in the confidentiality of transactions that occur between different types of addresses, which provides an opportunity to obtain information about Z-addresses. Such an opportunity was formed by tracking the behavioral factor of users.
"Our heuristics would have been significantly less effective if the founders interacting with the pool behaved in a less regular fashion," they write. "In particular, by always withdrawing the same amount in the same time intervals, it became possible to distinguish founders withdrawing funds from other users."Representatives of Zcash already know about the problem, so now they are working on its solution: they are changing the patterns. In addition, the founder of this cryptocurrency, Zooko Wilcox, and the marketing director Josh Swihart spoke about the situation, describing the upcoming update of the Zcash protocol, which is necessary to reduce the risks for anonymity "invite other scientists to join with us in investigating these questions that are important to the future of human society." Subscribe to The Coin Shark news in Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_coinshark
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