Analysis of Address Linkability in Tornado Cash on Ethereum

Yujia Tang, Chang Xu*, Can Zhang, Yan Wu, Liehuang Zhu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Tornado Cash, the most popular non-custodial coin mixer on Ethereum, is widely used to protect the privacy of addresses. However, some inappropriate transaction behaviors in Tornado Cash mixing mechanism lead to the risk of privacy leakage. More specifically, the malicious attackers can link multiple addresses of the same users according to the transaction data. Motivated by the above problem, this paper systematically analyzes the privacy issues of Tornado Cash for the first time. In this paper, we give the macroscopic analysis of Tornado Cash based on the on-chain data and formalize two types of transaction patterns. Focus on the presented transaction patterns, we propose three heuristic clustering rules to link the users’ addresses, which reduce the size of users’ anonymity set. Finally, we perform the experiment on real Tornado Cash transaction data to describe the effectiveness of the proposed clustering rules.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCyber Security - 18th China Annual Conference, CNCERT 2021, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsWei Lu, Yuqing Zhang, Weiping Wen, Hanbing Yan, Chao Li
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages39-50
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)9789811692284
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event18th China Cyber Security Annual Conference, CNCERT 2021 - Beijing, China
Duration: 20 Jul 202121 Jul 2021

Publication series

NameCommunications in Computer and Information Science
Volume1506 CCIS
ISSN (Print)1865-0929
ISSN (Electronic)1865-0937

Conference

Conference18th China Cyber Security Annual Conference, CNCERT 2021
Country/TerritoryChina
CityBeijing
Period20/07/2121/07/21

Keywords

  • Address linkability
  • Ethereum
  • Heuristic cluster
  • Tornado Cash

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