Abstract

Permissionless blockchains protocols such as Bitcoin are inherently limited in transaction throughput and latency. Current efforts to address this key issue focus on off-chain payment channels that can be combined in a Payment-Channel Network (PCN) to enable an unlimited number of payments without requiring to access the blockchain other than to register the initial and final capacity of each channel. While this approach paves the way for low latency and high throughput of payments, its deployment in practice raises several privacy concerns as well as technical challenges related to the inherently concurrent nature of payments that have not been sufficiently studied so far. In this work, we lay the foundations for privacy and concurrency in PCNs, presenting a formal definition in the Universal Composability framework as well as practical and provably secure solutions. In particular, we present Fulgor and Rayo …

Date

2017

Authors

Giulio Malavolta, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Aniket Kate, Matteo Maffei, Srivatsan Ravi

Book

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security

Pages

455-471