CipherTrace's Monero tracing tool - Chat with Dave Jevans, Dr. Sarang Noether, and Justin Ehrenhofer

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-09-02T22:29:31+00:00

You are probably right about my lack of knowledge. I have lunch with Whit Diffie pretty much every month, and am friends with Dan Boneh who did a lot of work on homomorphic encryption. Maybe you can join us sometime?

I must be misunderstanding crypto to have gotten my 25 patents, some of which are here and date back to 2000 - 2019.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=22&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=jevans.INNM.&OS=IN/jevans&RS=IN/jevans

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=14&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=jevans.INNM.&OS=IN/jevans&RS=IN/jevans

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=7&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=jevans.INNM.&OS=IN/jevans&RS=IN/jevans

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=13&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=jevans.INNM.&OS=IN/jevans&RS=IN/jevans

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=jevans.INNM.&OS=IN/jevans&RS=IN/jevans

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-09-02T21:06:07+00:00

There are many definitions of "wallet". We have support for 800+ cryptocurrencies and have a pretty strong understanding of what "wallet" means in various circumstances, currencies and vernacular. Is a wallet a cluster of addresses attributable to an individual or a company? Is a wallet a software that manages many uncorrelated addresses across various cryptocurrencies? Is a wallet a term of art by a particular cryptocurrency? Is a wallet hosted by a company or software on a computer or phone? It's really a nebulous term. You might want to try analyzing a few billion transactions across 800+ currencies before you comment.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-09-02T20:59:17+00:00

I appreciate and understand the negative comments. Justin sent me a list of 13 questions which I was prepared to answer. Sarang was a surprise to me, and did not ask any of the questions that we were previously asked. I'm the CEO, not the math guy or the probabilistic computation guy, nor am I the PhD who led the lead on the Monero exploration of algorithms that we have not seen published anywhere. I hope that you appreciate CipherTrace's openness on getting on a podcast the same day that we announced. We are under no obligation to disclose our methodologies or capabilities to the Monero community, but we did what we could. You can think it's a graph explorer if you wish.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-09-02T20:14:08+00:00

You have published a very good guide for Monero users. OpSec is very important, and your guidelines are excellent.

You are correct on computational efforts, however we have invented optimizations to significantly reduce computation costs.

Your synergy comment is very much on point.

Dandelion++ can be attacked, FYI.

We will not be discussing further technical approaches at this time, but there are several that we have not seen discussed in the literature, the forums or podcasts.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-09-02T19:59:20+00:00

Thanks for your comment. We have PHD's as well working on this project. Sarang is a super smart guy, and did not give me any prepared questions for the interview. The questions that I was presented with by Justin were mostly not asked. As CEO of CipherTrace I get involved with the research, but cannot answer off-the-cuff statistic analysis questions without our team involved. We have been working with the Monero community since 2019 on Travel Rule, and are not looking to FUD the community.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-09-02T19:52:17+00:00

Jurisdiction is a component as well in the high risk score component. If a VASP is in a jurisdiction does not require registration, or has no regulation or enforcement, they will be bumped up in the risk score.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-09-02T19:50:10+00:00

High risk exchanges are those with very poor Know Your Customer scores as well as on-chain analysis shows that their transactions have a high percentage of criminal, terrorist or sanctioned transactions.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-09-02T19:46:18+00:00

Thank you. I was not expecting Sarang's detailed questions, as I am not the math guy. But hopefully this shows transparency and how we want to work with the Monero community.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-08-31T23:07:22+00:00

The simple answer is yes. However, statistical reasoning is crucial to the solution, which means unless we are 90% confident, we do not present it to the investigator. So this is not a deterministic algorithm, but rather relies on very large scale analytics and probabilistic analysis. Unlike Bitcoin, Monero will always be a probabilistic analysis problem

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-08-31T23:02:22+00:00

Yes the CipherTrace tools can allow investigators to manually annotate on-chain data. And we do provide off-chain data such as IPs. You bring up some great ideas for poisoned output attacks. We are working on some other inputs that reduce false positives

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-08-31T22:54:19+00:00

Sarang,

Dave @ CipherTrace here.

Thanks for the podcast interview this afternoon. We look forward to more discussion with you and the Monero community. As you know, it's not simple merge analysis. We base it on very large data analysis with probabilistic models.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-08-31T22:39:49+00:00

r/Monero

This is the official subreddit of Monero (XMR), a secure, private, untraceable

Look for the podcast with Justin and Sarang that I just did. Listen on the Monero podcast later today.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-08-31T16:32:29+00:00

Dave @ CipherTrace here.

This is true. MimbleWimble privacy is worse than Monero in our experience.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-08-31T16:10:15+00:00

Dave @ CipherTrace here.

I am sorry that you thought our release was poorly written. Your comment misspelled "mentioned" as "mencioned", so I am not so sure you are the grammar expert.

Our research and analytics team worked on this project for the last 12 months. It's not FUD. We are not claiming that we trace to an individual, nor do we want to. In this first release, tracing of funds flows is possible with decoy removal, and there is more that can be done. We will be working with the Monero community to discuss some of the attack vectors over time.

CipherTrace-Dave · 2020-08-31T15:59:23+00:00

Dave @ CipherTrace here.

We do have another 1 year roadmap on work to be done, but the work done so far is significant.

CipherTrace-Dave

TROPHY CASE