ambcrypto.com
While privacy may be the forte of cryptocurrencies like Monero [XMR] and Zcash [ZEC], sometimes things might get a little too private.
Earlier this week, the Monero community woke up to the cryptoverse’s collective angst after several security flaws in the private coin came to the fore. HackerOne, a vulnerability verifier and bug bounty platform, stated in its report,
“By mining a specially crafted block, that still passes daemon verification an attacker can create a miner transaction that appears to the wallet to include sum of XMR picked by the attacker. It is our belief that this can be exploited to steal money from exchanges.”
The report added that five DoS attack vectors were also revealed, with one of them being labeled critics. Additionally, within the Monero ecosystem, an application layer called ‘CryptoNote’ was also flagged as having a possible security breach, questioning the very essence of XMR, its privacy.
With growing concerns with Monero’s privacy and the network’s security flaws, the community was justifiably concerned and the same was reflected in its price. After reaching as high as $120 towards the close of January, the security-flaw bears dragged down the coin’s price to under $82, as recorded earlier this week.
The stabilizing bulls pushed the price up to its press time valuation of $92.85. However, in terms of the larger picture, XMR is down by 23.3 percent in the 7-day window.
Tuur Demeester, Founding Partner at Adamant Capital, questioned the coin’s price performance and charted the same against Bitcoin, which showed a steep decline. It should be noted that very few altcoins are in the green relative to the king coin, given the latter’s recent performance.
He stated,
Wondering why Monero / $XMR is performing so badly. Any ideas? (I don’t own it) pic.twitter.com/DJLXMulr5b
— Tuur Demeester (@TuurDemeester) July 5, 2019
Francis Pouliot, CEO of Bull Bitcoin, reasoned that Bitcoin’s privacy, especially due to CoinJoin transactions coupled with its liquidity, which in his eyes is a “big component of privacy,” propelled the king coin ahead of its altcoin competitors, despite the latter being niche operators. He tweeted,
CoinJoin works and Bitcoin privacy is increasing. Liquidity is a big component of privacy. Altcoins cannot compete. https://t.co/YUeJS5J5M2
— Francis Pouliot ☣️ (@francispouliot_) July 5, 2019
However, it should be noted that Monero has responded to the above concerns, adding that the security flaws were disclosed four months ago and a patch, for the same, has also been provided. HackerOne’s vulnerability report detailed older events and currently, no such flaws persist.
We actually publicly disclosed the bug four months ago already on the mailing list and provided a patch. The patch is included in v0.14, which all exchanges and services run. Thus, they are protected from this bug. \1
— Monero || #xmr (@monero) July 5, 2019