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+ dev diaries tag added to all backlog + MRL 7/29, 8/5, 8/20, 8/26, 9/2 + Dev 8/11, 8/25 + Community 8/3, 8/17, 8/31 + tini2p 8/8, 8/22, 9/5
221 lines
17 KiB
Markdown
221 lines
17 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: Logs for the Monero Research Lab Meeting Held on 2018-11-12
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summary: Sarang work, Surae work, and miscellaneous
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tags: [dev diaries, community, crypto, research]
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author: el00ruobuob / surae
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---
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# Logs
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**\<suraeNoether>** howdy everyone!
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**\<nioc>** meow
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**\<OpenSorceress>** :D
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**\<sarang>** hiyo
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**\<TheFuzzStone[m]>** Sup!
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**\<rehrar>** hiyo
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**\<rehrar>** .....to quote sarang
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**\<suraeNoether>** so, let's flip the usual order of the meeting to allow for questions at the beginning
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**\<suraeNoether>** i like that
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**\<suraeNoether>** in fact, i'm going to call THAT the new "usual order"
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**\<suraeNoether>** so, the agenda today is 1) questions, 2) sarang's research this week and last, 3) mine, and 4) any other project discussion that's remotely relevant to research
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**\<sarang>** roger
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**\<suraeNoether>** so, someone give me and sarang your top two questions :D
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**\<nioc>** any updates on Konferemco preparations?
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**\<rehrar>** I should have a logo and branding guidelines today
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**\<rehrar>** in regards to MRL, where are we in the churn and privacy formalizations?
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**\<rehrar>** although I assume this will be talked about with your report of the week suraeNoether
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**\<suraeNoether>** that is precisely the case
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**\<suraeNoether>** i'm in the midst of getting hard numbers for a timing for a practical attack
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**\<suraeNoether>** sarang and i have discovered an anonymity metric that could give us a guideline for "how rapidly we need to chagne our ring size with respect to blockchain size to maintain our current levels of anonymity."
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**\<suraeNoether>** this is a very useful metric, but it's dangerous to misinterpret it
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**\<sarang>** Let us shift that to the later agendum
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**\<suraeNoether>** so we're avoiding making formal proclamations about it, but we are going to use it as a rough guideline for future ring size increases
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**\<suraeNoether>** agreed
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**\<suraeNoether>** nioc our conference organizer has been checking out a few alternative venues, and we have already identified some vendors for things like catering
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**\<sarang>** I have a question... how the hell do I build the dalek bulletproof rust implementation for timing testing??!?!?!?!
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**\<sarang>** I know jack shiz about rust
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**\<suraeNoether>** that's an excellent question that occurred to me yesterday afternoon!
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**\<sarang>** they claim to be bonkers fast, even compared to libsecp256k1 (which seems nutso to me)
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**\<suraeNoether>** they are claiming some mad speed gainz on top of your already mad speed gainz
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**\<sarang>** They don't have batch verification yet tho
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**\<sarang>** (it's on their issue list)
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**\<suraeNoether>** jfc
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**\<sarang>** So I want to run timing tests myself to see
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**\<suraeNoether>** if that's the case, then... man that implementation is bonker fast like what-what
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**\<sarang>** I don't think they're lying, but I'm also naturally skeptical
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**\<sarang>** I don't find it terribly relevant since we're already pretty fast
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**\<suraeNoether>** i suspect that bulletproofs are going to benefit from 40 years of optimizations in linear algebra and ECC very very quickly
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**\<sarang>** and any changes specific to underlying curve architecture aren't useful for us ATM
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**\<rehrar>** sarang: what if it's so fast it can reverse the blackchain continuum?
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**\<rehrar>** somethign to look into
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**\<sarang>** Ah yes, the chain shrinks over time
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**\<sarang>** negachain
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**\<suraeNoether>** the blackchain continuum hypothesis, by tom clancy
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**\<suraeNoether>** or dan brown
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**\<sarang>** Anyway, it won't build for me, but I'll verify timings once I get it figured out
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**\<rehrar> \<sarang>** Ah yes, the chain shrinks over time <-- it will give extra space to your computer when it goes negative
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**\<sarang>** However, they also have ideas for non-power-of-2 stuff, which was on the back burner for me
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**\<sarang>** if it proves useful for them in a way that translates to us, great
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**\<suraeNoether>** nioc i believe we already have enough funding availalbe to put a deposit down on a location, and I would like to do that before the end of 2018. email invitations to speakers will be start being setn out this week
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**\<sarang>** nice
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**\<sarang>** Also our other conference FFS (Stanford) was funded recently, so many thanks on that front
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**\<suraeNoether>** in general: thank you to all contributors who make Monero Research Lab a funded thing
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**\<sarang>** suraeNoether and I will learn next month if either of us will be speaking there
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**\<sarang>** anyway, other questions for us?
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**\<rehrar>** ne
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**\<sarang>** In the absence of further questions, we can talk recent research
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**\<sarang>** This past week, I did two events in Chicago
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**\<sarang>** one was a hands-on Monero development workshop
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**\<sarang>** the other was a more general talk on privacy tech
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**\<sarang>** both videos are on YouTube, linked from the Monero Moon posting
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**\<sarang>** thanks to the Chicago Bitcoin and Open Blockchains group for hosting me
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**\<suraeNoether>** Did you have a good time? think you'll do something like that again?
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**\<sarang>** Yeah, I think it was very valuable
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**\<sarang>** They had good turnout and excellent questions
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**\<sarang>** I really like the workshop idea especially
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**\<sarang>** Aside from that work, I did a good amount of lit review to support suraeNoether's work (discussed shortly) on graph matchings, which was an extension of some earlier analysis we did on spent output analysis
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**\<suraeNoether>** what was the demographic of the crowd like?
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**\<sarang>** The workshop was smaller (due to scheduling shenanigans for some participants) but had folks interested in math/CS/development
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**\<sarang>** The talk had a good mix of technical folks and well-wishers
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**\<sarang>** It'd be cool to find a way to host an interactive online workshop
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**\<OpenSorceress>** what would that entail?
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**\<sarang>** Well, one set of tasks I had them do was use a simple Python ed25519 library to build some constructions
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**\<sarang>** like Pedersen commitments and Schnorr sigs
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**\<rehrar>** lol, love the name OpenSorceress. That's funny.
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**\<sarang>** So being able to do video w/ slides for introductory work would be good
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**\<sarang>** as well as interactive stuff to help the participants write code
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**\<sarang>** Then we did some basic RPC stuff
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**\<OpenSorceress>** like remote pairing?
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**\<sarang>** OpenSorceress: some situation where the workshoppers could do in-browser code, perhaps, and then let me assist interactively if needed
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**\<sarang>** I don't know if there is such a thing already
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**\<sarang>** just spitballing here
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**\<suraeNoether>** that is pretty awesome, sarang! i'm glad it's online.
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**\<OpenSorceress>** there is
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**\<sarang>** orly
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**\<OpenSorceress>** yeppers
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**\<OpenSorceress>** -> floobits pops to mind
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**\<sarang>** Cool, let's discuss after meeting
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**\<OpenSorceress>** :) ok
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**\<sarang>** I've also been working to integrate stealth addresses into the RTRSRingStringRuffCT optimizations
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**\<sarang>** and other minor tasks, etc
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**\<suraeNoether>** allrighty
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**\<sarang>** How about you suraeNoether? The graph matching, perhaps
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**\<suraeNoether>** well, i've been doing the churn and graph theoretic stuff
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**\<suraeNoether>** as I mentioned earlier, sarang and I have stumbled upon a class of anonymity metrics for graphs such as ours, and this will give us a quantitative basis for maintaining at least our current levels of anonymity as the blockchain gets larger
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**\<sarang>** It's worth noting that this isn't even new analysis
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**\<sarang>** But a really clever interpretation of older stuff that suraeNoether came up with
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**\<sarang>** which is always great in math
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**\<suraeNoether>** correct, in fact several of these were proposed right around the time Bitcoin was proposed, which amuses me
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**\<suraeNoether>** 2007, 2008, 2009
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**\<rehrar>** so are you saying that as the blockchain gets larger, anonymity decreases?
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**\<suraeNoether>** well, consider the following situation
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**\<suraeNoether>** let's say something ridiculous like "tomororw Monero goes back to ring size 1"
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**\<sarang>** It's important to note that "anonymity" here means "anonymity according to a very specific metric formulation that may or may not correspond to a particular threat model"
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**\<suraeNoether>** what happens? a bunch of blocks are added to the monero blockchain, all of which are totally linkable
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**\<suraeNoether>** this is an edge case of the following idea:
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**\<notmike>** Even I could link them!
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**\<suraeNoether>** heh
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**\<suraeNoether>** if we take our present system and add a bunch of non-anonymous stuff, we aren't improving our anonymity
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**\<suraeNoether>** in fact, we are decreasing our anonymity, by essentially diluting our nice big fat blockchain filled with fat ring sigs with non-anonymous data
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**\<sarang>** At their heart, these metrics use numbers of matchings to relate to some idea of anonymity
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**\<sarang>** a graph matching is a possible global spend history, of which there will be many
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**\<sarang>** Think of it as being a guess about true spends that's at least \_consistent\_, but of course not provable
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**\<sarang>** My current view of this type of analysis is that, being only a heuristic that could be combined with things like output age, it provides the same types of plausible deniability that ring sigs have always offered
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**\<sarang>** however
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**\<sarang>** what suraeNoether was saying about it being useful to examine proposed changes is a good idea
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**\<sarang>** So you can say "if we increase ring size to X given usage patterns Y, this metric implies that anonymity gets better"
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**\<sarang>** it's not possible to say things like "anonymity gets Z% better" though
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**\<suraeNoether>** so, to answer your question rehrar: the Edman anonymity level is \*negatively\* related to overall graph size and \*positively\* related to ring size. so we can say "okay, if our blockchain was \*this\* big, how big of a ring size would we need to have similar EAL to today?"
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**\<suraeNoether>** the fact of the matter is, though, it very slowly changes with respect to graph size at these levels
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**\<rehrar>** got it
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**\<suraeNoether>** to maintain an EAL similar ot what we have today, the blockchain could be 10x larger
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**\<suraeNoether>** and we might need a ring size of like 15 at that point, or something like that, to make it equal exactly
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**\<sarang>** I have the same types of broad, non-mathematical questions about global anonymity that I do about rings in general
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**\<sarang>** If there are 2^64 possible spend histories, is that good enough for our threat models? What if there were only 2^4? I don't know
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**\<suraeNoether>** sarang actually we can sort of answer that question quantitatively
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**\<sarang>** Well, for some threat models, "good enough" means "enough reasonable doubt to avoid someone getting in trouble for a spend history they weren't actually involved in"
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**\<sarang>** and that depends on how your legal system works
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**\<sarang>** What types were you considering?
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**\<suraeNoether>** the question an attacker needs to answer is "out of all possible spend histories with a likelihood greater than some C of being the true spend history, what % of these is a specific edge traced?" for example, if in 95% of all plausible and likely histories, edge e sending monero from address X to address Y is included in the matching, we conclude that edge e is the true spender.
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**\<suraeNoether>** we may be able to quantify our security on an individual level that way, and see how it is sensitive to game parameters
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**\<suraeNoether>** anyway, 100% of my MRL attention is on this paper right now
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**\<sarang>** A lot of this (not just graph metrics) seems to be chasing after specific heuristics (some unknown) without a real fundamental idea of what guarantees we want to be able to offer
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**\<sarang>** Subtly moving from "not provable spending" to "not heuristically-guessable spending" seems like a generally good idea, but it's like swiss cheese
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**\<suraeNoether>** all of my work so far is highlighting, essentially, the urgency with which we need to replace ring signatures
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**\<sarang>** true
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**\<suraeNoether>** and the fundamental problem with using KYC exchanges
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**\<sarang>** Well, those aren't going anywhere
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**\<sarang>** and if anything, more people will move to them
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**\<hyc>** as opposed to DEXs?
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**\<sarang>** Do you know of any usable ones?
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**\<hyc>** I assume Bisq works
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**\<gingeropolous>** bisq .. ?
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**\<hyc>** haven't used it
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**\<rehrar>** question on replacing ring signatures...is there any sort of tech (eevn un battle tested) that exists at the moment?
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**\<sarang>** nor have I
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**\<sarang>** rehrar: no
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**\<suraeNoether>** i hear bisq is good, but i haven't used it yet
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**\<suraeNoether>** rehrar: yes and no
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**\<sarang>** not without sacrificing trust
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**\<suraeNoether>** or speed/efficiency
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**\<sarang>** correct
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**\<suraeNoether>** there are some trustless set-ups that are unreasonably slow
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**\<hyc>** if we could do cross-chain atomic swaps with BTC that would eliminate a huge chunk of exchange usecases
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**\<suraeNoether>** or big
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**\<sarang>** IMO the goal of the graph matching analysis should be to at least get an order-of-magnitude estimate on Monero global spend histories
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**\<suraeNoether>** hyc that is 100% correct, and we have all the theoretical framework for that except SPV at this point, but the recent nipopow paper and another recent paper may fix that too
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**\<sarang>** I'm not convinced this provides an adversary with remarkably more actionable data than existing heuristics
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**\<OpenSorceress>** how would you go about sussing that out?
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**\<sarang>** And while it should push us toward better non-ring-sig solutions, I also don't want to FUD our users in the same way that all the other Monero tracking papers have
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**\<suraeNoether>** it should provide literally the same amount of data, just one is a global approach and one is a txn-by-txn approach
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**\<sarang>** OpenSorceress: run the analysis on at least a portion of the chain
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**\<sarang>** suraeNoether: implementing nipopow is a huge undertaking
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**\<suraeNoether>** yes
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**\<sarang>** suraeNoether: what do you see as the goal of the analysis?
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**\<suraeNoether>** provide actionable advice for the monero community on how to mitigate the worst known traceability chainalsysis attack. ultimately
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**\<sarang>** in terms of ring size specifically?
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**\<sarang>** given that the EAL is sensitive to it?
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**\<suraeNoether>** not necessarily, although that is presently a facet of the analysis, yeah.
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**\<suraeNoether>** i mean, at this point, I think that further increases in ring size without order-of-magnitude increases... i'm not convinced of their efficacy, but i can't say either way at this point
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**\<sarang>** What's the takeaway from all of this, for the folks in this meeting?
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**\<suraeNoether>** research is ongoing into the matter
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**\<suraeNoether>** progress is being made in terms of making actionable recommendations to the community
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**\<suraeNoether>** but we aren't announcing them yet, until after more consideration
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**\<suraeNoether>** i'm not sure what you mean
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**\<rehrar>** good enough for me
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**\<sarang>** Do you view this a fundamentally new form of analysis that provides adversaries with a lot of new damaging information?
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**\<sarang>** (as opposed to, for example, the closed-set attack, which really gave marginal information)
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**\<suraeNoether>** there is no practical way i can answer that question, sarang
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**\<sarang>** ok
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**\<suraeNoether>** i'm telling you it's the worst-known traceability attack
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**\<suraeNoether>** i'm estimating how bad it is
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**\<suraeNoether>** that's my job right now
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**\<sarang>** ok
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**\<sarang>** Anything else of note to share from your side regarding recent stuff?
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**\<suraeNoether>** not with respeect to MRL, no
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**\<sarang>** kk
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**\<suraeNoether>** and i have an appointment i need to get to you guys, so.. peach out
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**\<suraeNoether>** imagine whirled peas
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**\<suraeNoether>** etc
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**\<sarang>** np
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**\<suraeNoether>** love you guys \*smooches\*
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**\<sarang>** Anyone else wish to bring up something they've been working on?
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**\<sarang>** crickets!
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**\<hyc>** if you're bothered by blockchain sync speed, get your hands on Optane SSDs
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**\<sarang>** yeah?
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**\<OpenSorceress>** Optane SSDs?
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**\<endogenic>** SSDs?
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**\<sarang>** Ds?
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**\<endogenic>** ??
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**\<OpenSorceress>**
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**\<sarang>** I store the chain in RAM
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**\<hyc>** yeah http://www.lmdb.tech/bench/optanessd
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**\<endogenic>** LOL
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**\<sarang>** I build a new ASIC for each block that gets added
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**\<hyc>** Real Men store the blockchain in RAM :P
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**\<sarang>** Well, I'll officially adjourn today's meeting; thanks to all for attending
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**\<sarang>** Next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel
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**\<hyc>** ttyl
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**\<rehrar>** bai
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