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

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Network and System Security (NSS 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13787))

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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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We only require the NIZK to be weak UC-secure. A weak UC-secure NIZK allows an adversary to maul an existing proof to a new proof for the same statement. Looking ahead, it suffices for our construction since we merely require witness to be extracted in the UC setting. Thus we use the basic lifting technique of [8] which only achieve this weak version of UC security.

  2. 2.

    We recommend \(\lambda _1=256\) and \(\lambda _2=168\) for 128-bit security.

  3. 3.

    In our implementation, we use SHA256. In the security analysis, we require that H is collision-resistant.

  4. 4.

    Looking ahead, existence of such \(k_{i+1}\) is not sufficient. We must ensure that the simulator is able to extract the witness. This, in combination with the collision-resistance property of H, ensures \(U_i\) that if the right lock is released, he/she will be able to release its left lock.

  5. 5.

    For simplicity, the off-chain pseodrandom generator G is also instantiated using SHA-256.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

    Mengling Liu & Man Ho Au

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  1. Mengling Liu
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  2. Man Ho Au
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Correspondence to Mengling Liu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Xingliang Yuan

  2. The University of Queensland, Queensland, QLD, Australia

    Guangdong Bai

  3. University of Malaga, Málaga, Spain

    Cristina Alcaraz

  4. Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Suryadipta Majumdar

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Liu, M., Au, M.H. (2022). Practical Anonymous Multi-hop Locks for Lightning Network Compatible Payment Channel Networks. In: Yuan, X., Bai, G., Alcaraz, C., Majumdar, S. (eds) Network and System Security. NSS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13787. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23020-2_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23020-2_31

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