Papers › Tutela: An Open-Source Tool for Assessing User-Privacy on Ethereum and Tornado Cash

Tutela: An Open-Source Tool for Assessing User-Privacy on Ethereum and Tornado Cash

18 Jan 2022arXiv:2201.06811archive 2025-07-28

Mike Wu, Will McTighe, Kaili Wang, Istvan A. Seres, Nick Bax, Manuel Puebla, Mariano Mendez, Federico Carrone, Tomás De Mattey, Herman O. Demaestri, Mariano Nicolini, Pedro Fontana

A common misconception among blockchain users is that pseudonymity guarantees privacy. The reality is almost the opposite. Every transaction one makes is recorded on a public ledger and reveals information about one's identity. Mixers, such as Tornado Cash, were developed to preserve privacy through "mixing" transactions with those of others in an anonymity pool, making it harder to link deposits and withdrawals from the pool. Unfortunately, it is still possible to reveal information about those in the anonymity pool if users are not careful. We introduce Tutela, an application built on expert heuristics to report the true anonymity of an Ethereum address. In particular, Tutela has three functionalities: first, it clusters together Ethereum addresses based on interaction history such that for an Ethereum address, we can identify other addresses likely owned by the same entity; second, it shows Ethereum users their potentially compromised transactions; third, Tutela computes the true size of the anonymity pool of each Tornado Cash mixer by excluding potentially compromised transactions. A public implementation of Tutela can be found at https://github.com/TutelaLabs/tutela-app. To use Tutela, visit https://www.tutela.xyz.

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