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About this paper
Steven Goldfeder, Harry Kalodner, Dillon Reisman, Arvind Narayanan
Princeton University researchers demonstrate how prevalent third-party web trackers can deanonymize cryptocurrency users by linking their on-chain transactions to real-world identities, finding that standard web tracking is sufficient to compromise privacy even when using technologies like CoinJoin.
Key insights
- Significant information leakage from cryptocurrency transactions to third-party web trackers was observed on merchant sites.
- Individual blockchain transactions can often be uniquely identified based on parameters like timestamp and value, enabling direct address linking.
- A "cluster intersection attack" can link multiple payments by the same user across different websites, effectively defeating privacy-enhancing technologies like CoinJoin.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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