I haven’t been following monero too much but… I would not count on their protections to matter all that much. Because you can bet the FBI/CIA/NSA equivalents around the world have put in the effort to de-obfuscate that. Because this is a relatively low cost grant to a few grad students that means they can do whatever investigations they want without needing the equivalent of a warrant and cooperation from other orgs.
I am an old fart. But I definitely remember getting some DOD grants to work on a specific architecture (that never had widespread release) with mysterious instructions that I now understand map to common operations in cryptography (of the era). I got some nice papers about graph analysis and they got some very valuable ability to handle complex networks of interactions.
Tangential, but Real Genius is probably still the greatest media portrayal of STEM grad school in existence. You have those weird social interactions (because people with people skills already have real jobs) and those fucked up relationships (… hopefully not statutory rape…). But you are either a dumbass Believer or you rapidly grow to understand the inherent ethical concerns of your field of study. And as much as you wish you could take the weapon you accidentally made for the military and blow up a prop house with popcorn… the reality is that you end up closer to Lazlo and live with the realization that people are probably suffering and dying for your work for the rest of your life. And it is up to you on whether that manifests as alcoholism or activism.