Meeting summary: Monero Research Lab, 7 December 2022

This is a comprehensive summary, with added reference links, of the MRL meeting¹ from December 7th 2022, 1700 UTC.

Logs

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

221207-mrl.log (83 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 (UkoeHB², rbrunner³, Rucknium⁴, plowsof11⁵, ArticMine⁶, ghostway⁷, jberman⁸, sneurlax⁹, blankpage¹⁰, h4sh3d¹¹, hyc¹²)

• (1) Updates

  • (1.1) on research papers (P2P network anonymity solutions, and Dandelion++¹³):

  • Rucknium reported reading Sharma, P. K., Gosain, D., & Diaz, C. 2022. On the anonymity of peer-to-peer network anonymity schemes used by cryptocurrencies.¹⁴ and the original Dandelion++ paper¹⁵

  • (1.2) on Monero dev work, Seraphis¹⁶ and JAMTIS¹⁷:

  • UkoeHB was working on cleanup/review on his seraphis_lib branch¹⁸, a process that should take 2-4 more weeks; he extended an invitation for PR reviews from that branch to upstream; UkoeHB also updated jamtis address tag hints to use blake2b instead of a layered cipher¹⁹

  • UkoeHB explained the difference between address tags and address tag hints to blankpage

  • jberman explained to blankpage that RID’s (recipient identifiers) are the proposed shortened version of very long seraphis addresses (they’re an easy-to-read hash of the address)

  • jberman finished stress testing the pool and found a bottleneck + identified a couple changes for PR #8076²⁰: reducing trips to the daemon; he is planning to submit two pull requests: one to rbrunner’s branch and another to alleviate the existing bottleneck, before moving over to Seraphis impl work

  • (1.3) on Bulletproofs++²¹’²²:

  • plowsof11 was wondering how long the community should wait before putting the peer review forward for funding, considering that there was no further contact with the bp++ author since the last email where he said he was working on adding security proofs; plowsof11 noted that he sent the last email on november 30th

  • Rucknium suggested that the community might want to get the current paper reviewed if there is no update to it after 3 months

  • UkoeHB thought 2 weeks of no contact is a good time frame for a follow-up; jberman agreed

• (2) Open discussions

  • (2.1) on the research papers mentioned by Rucknium earlier in the meeting¹⁴’¹⁵:

    • Rucknium was not completely convinced that improvements can be made to D++ anonymity with some changes to the parameters, as the Sharma, Gosain, & Diaz paper claims, noting that he does not find their analysis very realistic; Rucknium recommended that no action should be taken at this time and suggested waiting for updates or peer reviews

    • UkoeHB was interested to hear vtnerd’s take on the paper

    • Rucknium hinted at a potential conflict of interest (in suggesting that existing anon network systems do not work well), considering the fact that one of the authors of the Sharma, Gosain, & Diaz (2022) paper is the Chief Scientist for Nym Technologies

    • (2.2) on Farcaster XMR-BTC atomic swaps²³:

    • h4sh3d mentioned that his team is finally reaching the end of last milestone for farcaster and after a final sprint, we can expect a Reddit post at the end of the week and a bit more info next research lab meeting: we’ll be near to release what we consider mainnet ready

    • (2.3) on discussing research papers:

    • blankpage was wondering if the moneroresearch.info annotation feature was being actively used in discussing research papers

    • UkoeHB noted that papers should be discussed here and comments can optionally be back-filled into the site

    • Rucknium acknowledged that the feature is not currently used much, but he hopes that it will be in the future: I will add a link to my comments here to the paper on MoneroResearch.info. We specifically chose the WIKINDX software for its annotation capabilities

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

Feedback, edits always welcome @/about.

-3RA