Blockchain-based Trustless Fair Payment Protocol for Verifiable Confidential Outsourcing Computation

Outsourcing computation has emerged as a highly appealing service for companies seeking cost-effective alternative to perform on-premises expensive computational tasks. However, the conventional payment protocols employed by service providers and clients exhibit certain drawbacks, including inherent unfairness and reliance on a trusted third party. Furthermore, these protocols often assume the service providers are honest and will return valid results, which may not be a realistic assumption in practice. Additionally, conventional outsourcing computation fails to adequately address data confidentiality concerns, thereby giving rise to privacy issues. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a trustless fair payment protocol for verifiable confidential outsourced computation by leveraging blockchain technology and cryptography. It then provides an instantiation with efficiency optimizations. Lastly, it highlights limitations of the protocol and suggests potential directions for future work. The proposed protocol can remove the need of trusts between outsourcing computation service providers and their clients and achieve fairness. It provides assurance that results were computed correctly in a privacy-preserving manner, instilling confidence in clients.