Formulators of a privacy coin XMR (Monero), found a Monero bug that can impact the transaction privacy of the users. On Monday, a warning came from the official Twitter account of Monero about a “rather significant bug” that has been found in the decoy selection algorithm of Monero, a system that is created to hide real output transactions within 10 decoys in a ring.
What Is Monero Cryptocurrency?
The popularity of digital currencies is increasing with each passing day. These are digital or virtual currencies that are decentralized and can be used to spend or traded through blockchain technology. Many of them focus on enhancing anonymity and privacy, although their success varies largely.
Monero is a privacy oriented, open source digital currency that was launched in 2014. Investors can do Monero mining with their own CPUs which implies they are not required to pay for special hardware.
Monero price in INR: Rs 16,474
This Monero bug was identified by developer Justin Berman. This bug creates sufficient chances that the output transaction of the user can be identified as the real spend within decoys if the funds are spent immediately by the user following the lock time in the initial 2 blocks, or 20 minutes after getting the funds.
The developers focused on the fact that this Monero bug does not have a risk to any data about the address or the amount of transaction but rather it can only trace the emergence of an XMR transaction. According to the Monero developers,
“Funds are never at risk of being stolen. This bug persists in the official wallet code today.”
As per an XMR contributor in Reddit, the newly found bug affects transactions that belong from the past. To dissolve the potential privacy risk, it is recommended by the Monero developers to wait for one hour or more before you begin to spend your newly received Monero coins until a fix is rolled out by the community in the future wallet software update. A complete network upgrade or a hard fork is not needed to address the problem, the developers said.
Monero Coins Face Delisting
Recently South Korea announced that the country will ban the use of any privacy coins in the upcoming year while enacting more strict KYC regulations on digital currency users. The new regulations that were filed as updated to the Special Payment Act of the country, will overcome the “dark coins” that are considered difficult to trace.
Techniques And Probabilistic Methods For Tracing Monero
There is a big question that arises, can we really trace Monero? In September 2020, CipherTrace asserted to be the first entity in the world to have the potential to trace Monero transactions. The United States Department of Homeland Security made a contract with CipherTrace Monero for a sum of $3.6 million so that the Monero tracking technology could be formulated.
However, later it was discovered that the Monero tracking tool of CipherTrace may not be as complete as it seems to be. According to said CipherTrace CEO Dave Jevans,
“You can’t be as deterministic as Bitcoin. In tracing Monero, it’s really more of a probabilistic game.”
He further added,
“You can say: Well, I have a 98% probability that this went from this address to this address, or 78%, or that type of thing. It takes a different approach, rather than [saying]: I’m going to guarantee everything is perfect.”
Conclusion
Monero digital currency is the best privacy coin currently in the crypto market. It was launched in 2014, and till now it has become impossible to trace Monero coins. However recently the Monero company has published a tweet stating about the new Monero bug and has given its solution as well.
