Meeting summary: Monero Research Lab, 31 July 2024

This is a comprehensive summary, with added reference links, of the MRL meeting¹ from July 31st 2024, 1700 UTC.

Logs

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

240731-mrl.log (73 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: 11 (rucknium², vtnerd³, j​effro256⁴, rbrunner⁵, o​ne-horse-wagon⁶, 0​xfffc⁷, j​berman⁸, k​ayabanerve⁹, s​gp_¹⁰, b​asses¹¹, a​aron¹²)

• (1) Updates

  • rucknium was reading papers on gossip protocols and their privacy, bandwidth, and speed and commenting on some tx broadcast PRs (probably #9334¹³)

  • v​tnerd was doing LWS frontend stuff¹⁴ while working on jeffro256’s blockchain syncing PR¹⁵

  • 0​xfffc started implementing Boog900’s proposal to change how transactions are broadcasted to significantly reduce P2P bandwidth usage¹³ while reading the Erlay paper¹⁶ trying to get familiarized with broadcast mechanisms

  • j​effro256 was writing the documentation for Carrot (Cryptonote Address on Rerandomizable-RingCT-Output Transactions) addressing protocol¹⁷

  • k​ayabanerve reported preparing crates for auditing¹⁸

  • j​berman was working on adding fcmp++’s to the cryptonote::transaction class

• (2) Open discussions

  • (2.1) on ‘Stress testing monerod’¹⁹:

    • r​ucknium reported that spackle-xmr released Monero Stressnet Node v250.18.3.3.3²⁰: it pulled in everything that is in the new monero master plus the invalid blocks fix and jeffro256’s PR to reduce tx writes from 2 to 1

    • o​ne-horse-wagon thought that the stressnet should not end until every stress idea has been exhausted

      • 0​xfffc noted that they and rucknium will maintain the repo after Aug 8-9 when spackle-xmr is scheduled to leave the stressnet project: we expect to continue stress-net but with much less nodes

      • rucknium confirmed that’s the loose plan

  • (2.2) on ‘Potential measures against a black marble attack’²¹:

    • r​ucknium mentioned that the AntiDarknet group claimed responsibility for the suspected spam transactions earlier this year²²

    • k​ayabanerve commented that there was no evidence of their claims, and it didn’t completely make sense

    • j​effro256 agreed with k​ayabanerve, noting that the claim is currently unverified, added that it might be a mistake to assume that a black marble attack did not occur because some rando on a forum said so, and shared a link to a potential followup²³

    • r​ucknium did not disagree, but pointed to the fact that they did say something that a person who prepared spam txs would know: that wallet2 does not perform well when 200,000 accounts are created

    • rucknium thought that it would be bad for user privacy if the suspected spammer actually released the spam wallet(s) view key(s); k​ayabanerve agreed

  • (2.3) on ‘Pre-Seraphis Full-Chain Membership Proofs’ research²⁴:

    • k​ayabanerve noted that Veridise is moving forward with the R1CS gadget for evaluating this week, and there’s preliminary opinions on the GBP proof review

      • a​aron was very curious on the GBP opinion and shared that the Cypher Stack review of the Veridise report should be released to kayabanerve today as an initial draft for comment

    • rucknium shared a link to a Bulletproofs++ paper that introduces some clarification and corrections²⁵

    • j​effro256 was interested in potential auditors for the new addressing protocol (Jamtis or Carrot)

      • aaron thought that CS should put in a bid for reviewing the new addressing protocol

    • r​ucknium mentioned Cypher Stack’s review of the Salvium protocol²⁶ that seemed to add return addresses to Monero-like txs, which has been on getmonero.org’s roadmap for a while²⁷

      • rbrunner thought that the Salvium project was pretty ambitious and was confident that CS were in a good spot to review Monero stuff as well

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

Feedback, edits always welcome @/about.

-3RA