Abstract
Bitcoin, among other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies, has become increasingly popular. The expensive consensus process, however, severely limits the throughput of these systems. Allowing majority of the payment transactions to be settled off-chain, Payment channels (PC) have become a promising approach to address the scalability problem. Payment channel network (PCN) enables the payment between two users who do not have a direct PC through multi-hop payment across several payment channels. Lightning Network (LN), which handles around one trillion transactions per day, is the most well-known PCN deployed in practice. Improving the security and privacy of payment via PCN is an active research area. Recently, Malavolta et al. formalised a new cryptographic primitive known as anonymous multi-hop locks (AMHL) and demonstrated how it can be used to build a secure and privacy-preserving PCN. In this paper, we give a new construction of AMHL with the following features: (1) LN-compatible, i.e., it can be deployed into LN seamlessly; (2) secure in the universal composable framework; (3) highly efficient. Using our AMHL, a multi-hop payment with 5 users requires only 1458 bytes of off-chain communication. It compares favorably to state-of-the-art LN-compatible solutions, e.g., Fulgor and AMHL based on ECDSA, which requires 5 MB and 1.8 MB respectively. Furthermore, our solution is round-efficient. Specifically, the sender only needs to send one message to each node along the payment route.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Network and System Security 16th International Conference, NSS 2022, Denarau Island, Fiji, December 9–12, 2022, Proceedings |
Publisher | Springer Cham |
Pages | 547–560 |
Publication status | Published - 7 Dec 2024 |