The size of a ring signature refers to how many mixins are used to construct the ring. Monero currently has an enforced minimum ring signature size of seven, with six mixins used alongside the real unspent output in a transaction. A study found that higher ring-sizes reduce the timeframe in which a malicious attacker who owned a large number of unspent outputs would be able to perform effective analysis of transactions. Mandating larger ring-sizes also protects against a theoretical attack known as an EABE/Knacc attack, where a third-party can perform limited temporal analysis on transactions between two users.