Monero Developers Warn of Error Affecting Confidentiality of Transactions
The developers of the confidential Monero cryptocurrency have announced that they have discovered a serious error in one of the selection algorithms that may affect the confidentiality of transactions.
According to a Twitter statement from Monero developers, third-party developer Justin Berman has notified the project team that there is a “significant” error that could affect the privacy of users’ transactions.
An error found in one of the selection algorithms occurs when the user spends the funds received immediately after the end of the blocking period in the first two blocks (approximately 20 minutes after receiving the money). In this case, there is a possibility that the output of a new transaction can be determined to be a true transaction.
The project team claims that the error does not disclose information about addresses or amounts of transactions, and money cannot be stolen. This error still persists in the official Monero wallet code. The developers recommend that users proceed as follows to avoid the impact of the error:
“Users can mitigate their privacy risks by waiting one hour or longer before spending recently acquired Monero until a bug fix is added in a future wallet software update. No network hard fork is required to fix this error. ”
In conclusion, the developers noted that Monero Research Lab and Monero take this issue “very seriously”. Users can check the bug information on Github or the Monero forum.
Recall that in the summer of 2019, the team of the anonymous cryptocurrency Monero uncovered nine security vulnerabilities, including one that could allow hackers to steal XMR from exchanges.
