Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: XMR vs DRK
by
megges
on 25/03/2015, 10:35:40 UTC
I must admit i have not read that wall of text.
And im not a math guru, but just by reading the following i have big questionmarks over my head. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.

the following text in the monero whitepaper:
"to succed in the attack, an event whose probability is considered to be neglible" - sry like said im not a math guru, perhaps im wrong, but how could that be something valid proven. dunno if it was you or smooth but someone of you moneroguys liked to say over and over again that the anonymity of darksend has not been proven.
But isn't that exactly the same like if calculations for example say that to deanomyze a darksend transaction the probability is 0.00000000x if you don't own x or all masternodes. So its probability of this is neglible also and so its proven as anonym?!

Cryptographic negligibility has a very specific meaning. Something like a one-way hash function can still be attacked (ie. the original value corresponding to the hashed value can be determined), but it would typically take more power than in the universe to brute-force it. We normally state negligibility on the basis of a computationally bounded adversary, that is to say an adversary who has access to a reasonable amount of processing power regardless of the cost or speciality of the equipment required.

Put more simply: if there is a 0.000000001 chance of deanonymising a transaction that is only around 2-30. Comparatively, you have a 2-256 chance of brute-forcing a single Monero output in a single transaction. 2-30 is not computationally hard, would you trust a site storing your passwords with a 30-bit hash?

To make matters worse: as we get closer to more practical quantum computing we have to consider the effect they will have on cryptography. Anything that depends on discrete logarithm hardness (eg. RSA) is dead in the water, but symmetric encryption and hash resistance will only be weakened, not completely ground up. For symmetric encryption it's "double the speed", so searching through a 2256 keyspace could be done by a quantum computer in 2128 time, so symmetric encryption strength would halve. For one-way hash functions (which cryptocurrencies are deeply reliant on) there's a similar speed up for hash preimage attacks (from 2n -> 2n/2) and collision resistance (from 2n/2 -> 2n/3). So basically take your "possibility of success" and halve it.

thanks for that explanation.