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Towards verifiable and privacy-preserving account model on a consortium blockchain based on zk-SNARKs

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Abstract

With high efficiency, low overhead, and high scalability, consortium blockchains have been gradually and deeply applied in various fields of society. Privacy preservation and information verifiability are essential for the application development of the consortium blockchains. The existing schemes of privacy preservation and information verifiability on the blockchain are mainly designed for public blockchains. Most of the existing privacy tokens are based on the less scalable Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model. The existing privacy tokens based on the account model either require offline information transfer or suffer from low efficiency and insufficient scalability. The consensus mechanism and operation process differences between the public and consortium blockchains make them impossible to apply in the consortium blockchains directly. While protecting the privacy of transaction information on consortium blockchains, there is no specific solution to both directly utilize the privacy tokens for transactions in the context of privacy information and verify the legitimacy of account balance changes before payments. This work proposes VmppToken, a verifiable and privacy-preserving account model on a consortium blockchain based on zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs). By participants generating the private data relationship credentials for each token transaction using the zero-knowledge proof, it enables each endorsing peer node to verify the data relationship for the zero-knowledge proof credentials before writing the transaction into the ledger. VmppToken realizes the verifiability of transaction information while protecting the privacy of account balance and transaction amount and ensures the legitimacy of the transaction. We elaborate on the construction of VmppToken and analyze the security of the circuit constructed by zero-knowledge proof. We implement a prototype of the model on Hyperledger Fabric based on Libsnark and conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate its efficiency and performance. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The generation time of each proof is about 10-12 seconds, and the average time of credential verification is only 2.03 milliseconds. The transaction processing speed is about 660 Transactions Per Second (TPS) on a moderately equipped server.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the editors and anonymous reviewers.

Funding

This research was supported in part by Future Network Scientific Research Fund Project under Grant FNSRFP-2021-YB-01 and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Project under Grant 61602114.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Cyber Science & Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 211189, China

    Xiaoyan Hu, Weicheng Zhou, Jun Yin, Guang Cheng & Hua Wu

  2. Purple Mountain Laboratories for Network and Communication Security, Nanjing, 211111, China

    Xiaoyan Hu

  3. Jiangsu Provincial Engineering Research Center of Security for Ubiquitous Network, Nanjing, 211189, China

    Xiaoyan Hu

  4. Research Base of International Cyberspace Governance (Southeast University), Nanjing, 211189, China

    Xiaoyan Hu

  5. Intelligent Automotive Solution BU, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Beijing, 100085, China

    Shen Yan

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  1. Xiaoyan Hu
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  4. Guang Cheng
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Contributions

Xiaoyan Hu and Weicheng Zhou wrote the main manuscript text. Jun Yin, Guang Cheng, Shen Yan, and Hua Wu provided guiding ideas and suggestions. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xiaoyan Hu.

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No conflict of interest exists in the submission of this manuscript, and the manuscript is approved for publication by all the authors. I would like to declare on behalf of my co-authors that the work described is original research that has not been published previously, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. All the authors listed have approved the manuscript that is enclosed.

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Hu, X., Zhou, W., Yin, J. et al. Towards verifiable and privacy-preserving account model on a consortium blockchain based on zk-SNARKs. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 16, 1834–1851 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-023-01497-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-023-01497-7

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