Practical Anonymous Multi-hop Locks for Lightning Network Compatible Payment Channel Networks

Mengling Liu, Man Ho Au

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

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 languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNetwork and System Security 16th International Conference, NSS 2022, Denarau Island, Fiji, December 9–12, 2022, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Cham
Pages547–560
Publication statusPublished - 7 Dec 2024

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