Monero (XMR)

A significant bug was found by the developers of the privacy-centric cryptocurrency Monero that has the potential of exposing the occurrence of an output transaction conducted immediately after receiving funds. The bug in the Decoy system was first discovered by software developer Justin Berman when he observed that transaction destination to be identified.

According to Berman’s overview of the decoy selection algorithm, the bug led to “next to 0 chance of selecting extremely recent outputs as decoys.” This essentially means that if the Monero [XMR] users spend their tokens within the time period of 20 minutes of receiving them, there is a strong possibility that their transaction would be detected as a real transaction among the many fake ones.

Monero confirms full network upgrade not required

Since its very inception, the privacy-focused crypto-asset has always been controversial. The crypto naysayers have always targeted the asset and associated it with dirty money that disappears without a trace. Hence, many community members were concerned about their privacy and being exposed to malicious entities.

However, Monero’s official Twitter handle explained that the bug in question does not disclose addresses or transaction amounts. More importantly, the user funds were never at risk of being stolen. It also notified that until a fix can be implemented in a future wallet software update, users can significantly reduce the risk to their privacy by waiting one hour or longer before spending their newly-received XMR token.

According to the Twitter thread, Monero Research Lab and Monero developers are investigating the bug and will provide an update when wallet fixes are available.

Previously, several financial regulators across the globe have attempted to break Monero’s privacy. In 2020, the US Internal Revenue Service offered a bounty of up to $625k o anyone who can “reliably produce useful results on a variety of real-world CI cryptocurrency investigations” involving the crypto-asset.

Monero [XMR] recorded an impressive rally after surging by 13.11% over the past week. Despite its association with fraudulent and illegal activities, and the dark side of the web among other controversies, Monero’s latest price action has outpaced all the other privacy-focussed cryptocurrencies.

Even as the coin took a mild hit following the market-wide correction, XMR bounced back in action as it recorded a mild increase of 1.06% over the last 24-hours. This pushed the price of the cryptocurrency as it was currently exchanging hands at $129.90 while holding a market cap of $2.30 billion and a 24-hour trading volume of $1.53 billion.

Now that the sideways trend appears to be coming to an end, what does the future looks like for the coin?

Monero [XMR] Daily Chart:

The popular privacy coin appeared to be consolidating below a crucial point of resistance for more than a month. After a period of entering stagnation, Monero was finally witnessing momentum building for another leg up.

The 50 DMA [Pink] slid below the XMR price candles after a brief stint above it following the retracement to its immediate support level while the 100 DMA [Yellow], as well as the 200 DMA [Purple], settled below it depicting a strong bullish momentum. Both 100 and 200 DMA now acted as crucial support points for the coin.

But are the rising optimism and the bullish sentiment among the buyers of XMR enough for the price to break above the current range?

The Bollinger Bands were in parallel to each other and did not show any distinctive hints of convergence or divergence. This essentially indicated that a period of consolidation within a tight rangebound would continue, at least for some time now.

The RSI also moved above the 50-median line in tandem with the price recovery which was indicative of a sentiment of increasing buying pressure among the market participants in the Monero ecosystem.

The above charts depicted that Monero has resumed an uptrend and would enjoy gains in the coming days. However, a significant breach above the crucial level of $135.43 might take some time to materialize. If it manages to swing past this level, XMR could further eye $148.6 and $168 levels respectively.

The support levels were found at $122.9 and $91.74.

Data theft has become a major predicament in the world today. The attackers haven’t even spared Monero, a network built on privacy. Since the data pertaining to transactions as well as user information remain in the wraps of the Monero network, everything that happens in the network is almost masked. However, the efforts of the hacker were considered to have failed, as they had almost no impact on the Monero network.

Monero’s Riccardo Spagni Calls Attacker Incompetent

Privacy centric network, Monero was recently subject to dainty distress following an individual’s attempt to pry into the network. Elaborating on the recent attack, Monero took to Reddit and pointed out that a batch of malicious nodes was discovered. These nodes were reportedly trying to meddle with the network. The attacker was attempting to employ a Sybil attack on the network by striving to correlate the transactions to the IP addresses of the node that broadcasts it.

The network identified and listed the activities of the nodes that led to suspicion. This list included active injection into the peerlists of honest nodes, exploitation of bugs to make sure malicious nodes replace honest nodes in the peerlist, mirroring block heights of the nodes, and concealing of data pertaining to these nodes, recording and associating IPs with certain kinds of transactions along with several others.

In the Reddit post, Monero affirmed that nothing was compromised on the network as the attack had zero effect on stealth addresses, masked amounts as well as ring signatures. Riccardo Spagni aka fluffy pony shared an array of tweets assuring the users of the network that no data was compromised as the attacker was mostly incompetent. His tweet read,

While the Sybil attack is easier to execute on other currencies, attacking the privacy-centric network Monero is rather difficult. Nevertheless, Monero’s built-in solution, Dandelion++ came to the network’s rescue and lowered the impact of the attack on it. Detailing on the functions of Dandelion++, Spagni tweeted,

“Without getting technical, Dandelion++ works by randomly “diffusing” transaction broadcasts. This means that for a Sybil attack to link a transaction to a node’s IP address it has to be intercepted at the very first node in the “stem” phase of a Dandelion++ broadcast.”

Spagni further added that steering away from the incompetency of the attacker, the attack was not large enough to disrupt the network against Dandelion++ as the attacker would have to launch thousands of nodes to do so.