Accountable Monero System with Privacy Protection

Monero is one of the prominent cryptocurrencies bringing robust privacy safeguard levels. However, for Monero lacking accountability, it is easy to use anonymity and privacy for committing the crime without the leakage of identity. And some exchanges are not very receptive to Monero. The purpose of this study is to balance privacy and accountability in Monero. Specifically, we studied the way to provide accountability while keeping privacy. We develop an accountable Monero model. Our model isolates three kinds of roles, users, the trusted registration authority, and a trusted regulator. Accountability enables the trusted regulator to reveal the signer’s identity. Only the trusted regulator can trace users’ public keys as needed. We give a construction for the accountable Monero system by combining CryptoNote protocol with ElGamal encryption. Our instantiation is with a marginal influence on efficiency. The security of our scheme is based on the discrete logarithm and decisional Diffie–Hellman assumption.