Meeting summary: Monero Research Lab, 10 January 2024

This is a comprehensive summary, with added reference links, of the MRL meeting¹ from January 10th 2024, 1700 UTC.

Logs

The raw, unedited, full log file for this meeting:

240110-mrl.log (65 lines)

Summary

Note: it is possible that some relevant information may be missing from this summary; read the full log file for the complete, unedited discussion.

• Participants: 4 (Rucknium², rbrunner³, t​obtoht⁴, c​haserene⁵)

• (1) Updates

  • (1.1) on the Multisig Messaging System⁶:

    • t​obtoht has integrated most of the MMS in Feather Wallet, finished a first iteration for a wizard that guides users through setting up a new multisig wallet, shared a PoC for sending a 2/3 transaction, and was hoping to have a MVP ready soon

  • (1.2) on OSPEAD⁷ and Monero research papers⁸:

    • Rucknium was working on OSPEAD and reported the addition of about 20 recent papers to moneroresearch.info

  • (1.3) on BCH-XMR atomic swaps⁹:

    • Rucknium mentioned the first ever mainnet BCH-XMR atomic swap performed by PHCitizen¹⁰ and pat’s fundraiser for a BCH<>XMR atomic swap frontend¹¹

• (2) Open discussions

  • (2.1) on the MMS code:

    • t​obtoht was impressed with the MMS: beautifully written and the abundance of clearly written comments make it easy to understand and a joy to read

  • (2.2) on BCH community support for BCH-XMR atomic swap development:

    • Rucknium confirmed to rbrunner that the BCH community is indeed interested in the swaps, as BCH developers created the swap implementation¹², and the BCH fundraiser for a front-end¹¹ already received 101 BCH in 4 days

  • (2.3) on new Moneroresearch.info papers summaries:

    • rbrunner was wondering if there is anything directly about Monero in the new papers; Rucknium noted that there are a few useful papers that mention Monero, besides a few others that are focused on ‘How can we create a Monero-like system, but allow a central authority info about tx information’

    • Rucknium shared short summaries for several relevant papers:

      • Vijayakumaran (2023) ‘Analysis of Cryptonote transaction graphs using the Dulmage-Mendelsohn decomposition’¹³ (potentially relevant to Mordinal analysis when ‘black marbles’ reduce the effective ring size)

      • Wang, Lin, Huang, & He (2023). ‘Anonymity-enhancing multi-hop locks for Monero-enabled payment channel networks.’¹⁴ (a N + 1 of payment channel network (PCN) on Monero)

      • Buccafurri, De Angelis, & Lazzaro, (2023) ‘A traffic-analysis proof solution to allow k-anonymous payments in pseudonymous blockchains.’¹⁵ (a possible replacement for Dandelion++ according to Rucknium)

      • Scheid, Küng, Franco, & Stiller (2023) ‘Opening Pandora’s box: An analysis of the usage of the data field in blockchains’¹⁶ (potentially useful for Mordinal analysis)

      • Dijk & Schröder (2023). ‘Proof of concept for a Ethereum virtual machine on Cryptonote.’¹⁷ (Rucknium considered the PoC to be just embed plaintext Ethereum contracts in tx_extra and noted that this paper could be sent to anyone that asks ‘how can smart contracts exist on Monero?’)

      • Movsowitz Davidow, Manevich, & Toch (2023) ‘Privacy-Preserving Transactions with Verifiable Local Differential Privacy.’¹⁸ (Rucknium thought that this could help with keeping file data out of Monero signatures and with requiring a specific decoy selection algorithm, but noted it requires a trusted setup)

    • Rucknium invited meeting participants to add papers or write their own notes about the papers: I can create a user for you

    • chaserene proposed putting some [papers] in the ‘Open Research Q’s’ GH issue¹⁹; Rucknium agreed to add the PCN paper and noted that 3 other payment channel papers are already listed in the open research questions list

  • (2.4) on JAMTIS²⁰:

    • Rucknium reposted c​haserene’s pre-meeting question: could there be a method of of deriving Jamtis addresses such that once/if EdDSA is swapped for a post-quantum sig algo, the addresses remain the same? I’m very quietly hopeful because this would mean the migration could be undetectable from an end-user perspective

    • No one was able to answer c​haserene’s question, but rbrunner had a a gut feeling that the answer is no

Let me know if you find this kind of report helpful.

Feedback, edits always welcome @/about.

-3RA