Satoshi Has No Clothes: Failures in On-Chain Privacy by Ian Miers (Devcon4)

Wed, Oct 2, 2019, 12:00 AM

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on IPFS and more. https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/4/satoshi-has-no-clothes-failures-in-on-chain-privacy Payments in Ethereum and Bitcoin are, by default, transparent. Transactions are conducted between pseudonyms with the sender, recipient and value exposed. While this transparency enhances auditability and decentralization, it is a major privacy issue. A growing volume of research shows that these pseudonymous identities are easily linkable. This is a major issue for privacy, fungibility, and a free market. A variety of techniques have been proposed to alleviate these issues. These include but are not limited to Confidential transactions + Conjoin, RingCT/Cryptnote, Zerocoin, Zerocash,  Hawk, and Solidus. These techniques span a large multidimensional performance envelope in terms of transactions generation and validation time, size, as well as a range of cryptographic assumptions and data retention requirements. At the same time, these protocols offer markedly different levels of privacy against various threat models. Which one should we use? If performance were the sole issue, then systems without such enhancements would likely be preferred. Clearly some amount of privacy is necessary and the cost of getting it acceptable. The question is thus, which approaches provide sufficient privacy, in what contexts, and at what cost? Speaker(s): Ian Miers Skill level: Beginner Track: Privacy Keywords: security Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/ Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. Devcon 4 was held in Prague, Czech Republic on Oct 30 - Nov 2, 2018. Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/