Privacy Aspects and Subliminal Channels in Zcash

In this paper we analyze two privacy and security issues for the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Zcash. First we study shielded transactions and show ways to fingerprint user transactions, including active attacks. We introduce two new attacks which we call Danaan-gift attack and Dust attack. Following the recent Sapling update of Zcash protocol we study the interaction between the new and the old zk-SNARK protocols and the effects of their interaction on transaction privacy. In the second part of the paper we check for the presence of subliminal channels in the zk-SNARK protocol and in Pedersen Commitments. We show presence of efficient 70-bit channels which could be used for tagging of shielded transactions which would allow the attacker (malicious transaction verifier) to link transactions issued by a maliciously modified zk-SNARK prover, while would be indistinguishable from regular transactions for the honest verifier/user. We discuss countermeasures against both of these privacy issues. CCS CONCEPTS • Security and privacy → Distributed systems security; Privacypreserving protocols; Cryptanalysis and other attacks; • General and reference → Empirical studies.