A group of researchers from University College London (UCL) have identified a series of transactions zcash for weakening their anonymity.
In particular, by displacement of the “unprotected address — protected — unprotected” lose tokens “69.1% anonymity.”
Completely abandon this kind of movement is impossible: the zcash for the network is arranged so that before carrying out any transaction ZCH first pass through the pool of reserved addresses.
The zcash for network provides two types of addresses. T-addresses can be traced and are considered “unprotected”, that is, the balance at this address, and the associated transaction history available to all other members of the network. Z-addresses, on the contrary, protected and hiding the data about the movement and balance; with the exception of the timestamp of creation of the token and the corresponding mining fees.
The scientists also concluded that due to the vulnerability and cyclical nature of activities of the founders of zcash for inside the blockchain easier to obtain information about specific addresses:
“Our heuristic algorithms would be less effective if the creators of the zcash for guiding the pool were more chaotic. In particular, they are easier to distinguish from normal users, since they always derive the same amount for the same time”.
The researchers reported an issue zcash for developers prior to the publication of the article, which, according to them, has changed the approach to the creators of a cryptocurrency to industrial processes.
The official blog of the zcash for the company’s founder Zuko Wilcox (Zooko Wilcox) and Director of marketing John Swihart (John Swihart) congratulated the authors and called “other scientists to join the study of these issues is definitely important for the future of mankind.”
In the same post they commented on the vulnerability, discovered by UCL staff:
“It is important to understand how much suffering anonymity when you use reserved addresses solely as a “conductor”, but we do not recommend this method. Instead, you should store your zcash for protected address”.
Wilcox and Swart promised that the risks identified by scientists, will be minimized in future additions — in particular, the hard forks Sapling.
Today most transactions are unprotected. According Zchain, 85% of transactions on the blockchain zcash for last month are completely open, and only 0.6% are fully protected (that is, conducted between two z-addresses).
