Abstract
Blockchain systems have severe scalability limitations e.g., long confirmation delays. Layer-2 protocols are designed to address such limitations. The most prominent class of such protocols are payment channel networks e.g., the Lightning Network for Bitcoin where pairs of participants create channels that can be concatenated into networks. These allow payments across the network without interaction with the blockchain. A drawback is that all intermediary nodes within a payment path must be online. Virtual Channels, as recently proposed by Dziembowski et al. (CCS’18), allow payments without this limitation. However, these can only be implemented on blockchains with smart contract capability therefore limiting its applicability. Our work proposes the notion of –Lightweight– Virtual Payment Channels, i.e. only requiring timelocks and multisignatures, enabling Virtual Channels on a larger range of blockchain systems of which a prime example is Bitcoin. More concretely, other contributions of this work are (1) to introduce a fully-fledged formalization of our construction, and (2) to present a simulation based proof of security in Canetti’s UC Framework.
This work was supported by the Input Output Cryptocurrency Collaborative Research Chair funded by IOHK, JST CREST JPMJCR14D6, JST OPERA, JSPS KAKENHI 16H01705, 17H01695.
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A Additional Functionalities and Protocols
A Additional Functionalities and Protocols
The Global Functionality \(\mathcal {G}_{\mathsf {UTXO-Ledger}}\) models a UTXO based ledger maintaining a publicly readable set of UTXO. The differences between \(\mathcal {G}_{\mathsf {UTXO-Ledger}}\) and the ledger functionality by Kiayias et al. [12] are twofold. For one instead of using a verification predicate to check the validity of transactions, we move this verification into a second functionality \(\mathcal {F}_{\mathsf {Script}}\) representing required parts of a blockchains scripting language similar to the separation of ledger and smart contract functionalities in the work of Dziembowski et al. [8, 9]. For another we explicitly make use of UTXO which is required for our construction.
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Jourenko, M., Larangeira, M., Tanaka, K. (2020). Lightweight Virtual Payment Channels. In: Krenn, S., Shulman, H., Vaudenay, S. (eds) Cryptology and Network Security. CANS 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12579. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65411-5_18
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