‘Mimblewimble should not be considered as a viable replacement to ZCash or XMR,’ claims new research

The Mimblewimble technology and the Grin token based on it had created news earlier in the cryptocurrency industry after claims of new security measures and an increased use cases for the tokens. Recently, however, a cryptocurrency industry official has revealed that he was able to break Mimblewimble’s privacy technology using cheap methods.

Ivan Bogatyy, the General Partner at MetaStable Capital, claimed that the new technology’s privacy was fundamentally flawed and that he was able to uncover sender and receiver addresses for 96 percent of Grin transactions.

What makes this news more astounding was the fact that the details could be snatched away from users in real time. According to Bogatyy, Mimblewimble faced systemic issues that could not be fixed with a debugging and urged users to not consider it as a viable replacement to privacy-oriented cryptos such as Monero and ZCash.

According to the author of the paper that pointed out the shortcomings of the technology:

“Several researchers have hypothesized a possible privacy weakness in Mimblewimble. My contribution is to demonstrate the precise way to perform an attack, prove its viability on a live network, and measure its efficacy. In live testing on Grin, I was able to unmask the flow of transactions with a 96% success rate. Therefore, it’s now clear that Mimblewimble should not be relied upon for robust privacy.”

Bogatty has pointed to Mimblewimble’s linkability feature as its downfall, adding that cryptocurrencies like ZCash did not face this problem because it is an unlinkable cryptocurrency blockchain. Because of the linkability feature, anyone can track a sender/ receiver’s location after deobfuscating the transaction graphs.

The author also made a comparison analysis with Mimblewimble against ZCash and Monero. When it comes to the internal architecture of a ZCash transaction, it was found that each private set included all shielded coins. These shielded coins are the ones that are assumed to provide anonymity as well as privacy.

Monero transactions derive their privacy from the set of all “decoy transactions”. The paper admitted that Monero did have its specific set of ingrained issues but still performed better than Mimblewimble on a per-privacy factor basis. The main problem in Mimblewimble pointed out by the author was that it has one unshielded coin that can be tapped into for transactional information.

The research was candid in mentioning that despite its flaws, the Grin token [based on Mimblewimble] was still more privacy-oriented than Bitcoin.

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