ProxiMark breaks Monero XMR anonymization.

Monero + Tor: A network vulnerability has just been exposed! The Monero Research Lab is meeting tomorrow, July 29th, to discuss this... Monero is designed to hide: 👉 who sends 👉 who receives 👉 and how much To also protect the user's IP address, many people (and nodes) route their transactions through Tor. The paper shows that there is a vulnerability at the network level (not in Monero's cryptography itself) when using Tor with Monero. Explanation... When a Monero node runs behind Tor: ➡️ It creates an onion address (hidden service) ➡️ When it wants to send a transaction, it doesn't broadcast it directly on the clear internet ➡️ It first sends it only to two Tor proxy nodes (outgoing hidden services) before the transaction passes through the normal Monero network (clearnet). This is a peculiarity of how Monero handles Tor connections. An attacker can: 👉 Take the Location of these two outgoing connections from the target node 👉 Capture the transactions leaving this node 👉 Then use a technique called watermarking to link the Tor onion address to the machine's real IP address They call their method ProxyMark It takes place in three steps: ➡️ Identify the role of the nodes (which is a proxy, which is a client, etc.) ➡️ Capture the transactions originating from the target node ➡️ De-anonymize the location (find the real IP) The authors tested their attack on: 👉 the real Tor network 👉 the Monero mainnet 👉 and the testnet Reported results: Identification of onion addresses: 100% accuracy ‼️ Operating connections: Very effective (7 to 11 out of 100%) (12 connections depending on the conditions) Watermarking: 100% accuracy and over 91-93% recall In other words, under the conditions of their experiments, the attack works very well! 👉 It doesn't break ring signatures, stealth addresses, or RingCT 👉 It doesn't allow reading the content of Monero transactions 👉 It doesn't de-anonymize users who don't use Tor this way (or who use Tor correctly with other precautions) It's a network attack... it exploits how Monero and Tor interact, not the on-chain crypto. The Monero Research Lab is discussing it tomorrow, July 29th. They're going to look at whether anything needs to be changed in the code. In short... As soon as two protocols meet, a vulnerability often appears 😉