[ZcF-general] Cryptolux Project Report

[Daniel Feher]

In our project we have continued our earlier works on empirical analysis in
Zcash. This work partly consisted of improving and refining our previous
work. We have tweaked our heuristics to create an even more precise and
verifiable mining transaction linkage, which resulted in slightly worse
results than in our original report, but currently every linkage is done
with a very high confidence level (while previously this confidence was
lower). This work (titled 'Privacy and Linkability of Mining in Zcash') was
accepted and presented at IEEE CNS 2019. The paper can be found at the
following link: https://orbilu.uni.lu/handle/10993/39996


Our second main area of research was mainly considering mining hardware. In
detail, what is the mining hardware landscape, how the different GPUs and
mining rigs are distributed. Furthermore, we have investigated the privacy
of a single miner based on the miner's activity in the live blockchain,
what information can be learned from it. Finally, we have investigated the
effect of ASIC miners on the mining landscape in terms of decentralization.
This work (titled 'Portrait of a Miner in a Landscape') was accepted and
presented at the CryBlock 2019 workshop. The paper can be found at the
following link: https://orbilu.uni.lu/handle/10993/39995


These two topics were also presented at the Zcon1 conference, the talk is
available at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bydpHmP-7k

Our last main topic of research consisted of active attacks on the Zcash
blockchain. The first attack we have investigated is our previously
presented Danaan-gift attack, which we describe with much more scrutiny
than before. The second attack is the Dust attack, which exploits the
publicly available number of inputs and outputs of a shielded sapling
transaction. This work (titled 'Privacy Aspects and Subliminal Channels in
Zcash') is part of a larger paper that is accepted and going to be
presented at CCS 19.