Abstract
Blockchain-based payment systems (e.g., Bitcoin) have been wildly adopted for many scenarios since the transaction details are publicly accessible. Blockchain-based anonymous payment systems (e.g., Monero and Zerocash) have also been proposed to protect on-chain privacy, such as the sender’s or receiver’s balance, and the transaction amount. However, overly privacy preserving systems are sometimes abused for malicious behavior in lieu of suitable regulation. Thus, balancing between requirements for regulation and privacy has become an important issue for such systems. This paper proposes a blockchain-based confidential payment system with controllable regulation. To protect user privacy and provide controllable regulations, we realized the proposed system using threshold homomorphic encryption to encrypt user transaction values and balance. The encryption was performed with thresholded regulators’ keys and hence limits regulator abilities to decrypt a transaction. In addition, we can update the user’s balance using the homomorphic property, without decrypting the transaction value or user’s balance, preserving on-chain privacy, while satisfying all security requirements. A prototype implementation is provided for performance analysis.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers of ISPEC 2022 for their insightful suggestions on this work. This research is partially supported by the National Science and Technology Council, Taiwan (ROC), under grant numbers NSTC 109-2221-E-004-011-MY3, NSTC 110-2221-E-004-003-, NSTC 110-2622-8-004-001-, and NSTC 111-2218-E-004-001-MBK.
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Liao, YC., Tso, R., Liu, ZY., Tseng, YF. (2022). Blockchain-Based Confidential Payment System with Controllable Regulation. In: Su, C., Gritzalis, D., Piuri, V. (eds) Information Security Practice and Experience. ISPEC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13620. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21280-2_3
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