Naming the Harm: A privacy threat vocabulary for Ethereum builders

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Mate Soos, dactylic

Type: Talk

Expertise: No prior knowledge

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

We often talk about privacy with terms too fuzzy to properly reason with. Terms like "anonymous" -- but anonymous to whom, and to what extent? Even if anonymous, what does an attacker nonetheless learn about participants or their actions? LINDDUN names the potential harms precisely: linkability of actions, identifiability, awareness, etc. In this talk, we pair each harm definition with an example attack that happens in crypto, and with the corresponding mitigation technique, often a PET. We demonstrate the taxonomy's usefulness by constructing a data-flow diagram for Tornado Cash, and analyzing it. Privacy harms are analyzed for each data flow, allowing us to arrive at a more granular understanding of what protections Tornado Cash offers. Our aim is to allow everyone to apply this methodology to protocols and dApps, so our community can talk about privacy in a more nuanced way. This will improve our overall privacy stance, helping both builders and users.