Master Thesis

Add-on privacy solutions for blockchains

It is well-known that the users on permissionless blockchains are often tracked by analytical companies providing services to the governments and law enforcement. Thus, several works have attempted to build solutions to protect clients’ privacy. Existing privacy solutions are categorized into two different types: (i) new blockchain designs that are private by default [1,2] and (ii) add-on privacy solutions [3,4] that aims to offer privacy for clients of existing non-private blockchains (i.e., Ethereum and Bitcoin).

The project mainly focuses on add-on privacy solutions [3,4,5] that allow users to obfuscate their transaction graphs within an anonymity set. The goal of this project consists of understanding different existing add-on privacy solutions, formally defining security and privacy properties (i.e., unlinkability, thief-prevention, and availability) offered by different add-on privacy solutions, and comparing different add-on solutions according to their achieved properties. Finally, a possible concrete outcome of the project can be a new add-on privacy design that can be deployed and operated efficiently on a permissionless blockchain.

References

[1] Monero

[2] ZCash

[3] Sarah MeikleJohn and Rebekah Mercer, Mobius: Trustless Tumbling for Transaction Privacy, PETS 2018

[4] Duc V. Le and Arthur Gervais, AMR: Autonomous Coin Mixer with Privacy Preserving Reward Distribution, AFT 2021

[5] Tornado Cash

Contact Duc V. Le for more information.

Nature of the project: Theory 50%, Systems 50%.