research-article

Accio: Variable-Amount, Optimized-Unlinkable and NIZK-Free Off-Chain Payments via Hubs

Authors:

Dawu GuAuthors Info & Claims

CCS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

Pages 1541 - 1555

https://doi.org/10.1145/3576915.3616577

Published: 21 November 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Payment channel hubs (PCHs) serve as a promising solution to achieving quick off-chain payments between pairs of users. They work by using an untrusted tumbler to relay the payments between the payer and payee and enjoy the advantages of low cost and high scalability. However, the most recent privacy-preserving payment channel hub solution that supports variable payment amounts suffers from limited unlinkability, e.g., being vulnerable to the abort attack. Moreover, this solution utilizes zero-knowledge proofs, which bring huge costs on both computation time and communication overhead. Therefore, how to design PCHs that support variable amount payments and unlinkability, but reduce the use of huge-cost cryptographic tools as much as possible, is significant for the large-scale practical applications of off-chain payments.

In this paper, we propose Accio, a variable amount payment channel hub solution with optimized unlinkability, by deepening research on unlinkability and constructing a new cryptographic tool. We provide the detailed Accio protocol and formally prove its security and privacy under the Universally Composable framework. Our prototype demonstrates its feasibility and the evaluation shows that Accio outperforms the other state-of-the-art works in both communication and computation costs.

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Cited By

Liang WLiu YYang CXie SLi KSusilo W(2024)On Identity, Transaction, and Smart Contract Privacy on Permissioned and Permissionless Blockchain: A Comprehensive SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/367616456:12(1-35)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676164

Index Terms

Accio: Variable-Amount, Optimized-Unlinkable and NIZK-Free Off-Chain Payments via Hubs
1. Security and privacy
  1. Systems security
    1. Distributed systems security

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cover image ACM Conferences

CCS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 2023

3722 pages

ISBN:9798400700507

DOI:10.1145/3576915

General Chairs:
Weizhi Meng
Technical University of Denmark
,
Christian D. Jensen
Technical University of Denmark
,
Program Chairs:
Cas Cremers
CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
,
Engin Kirda
Khoury College of Computer Sciences

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

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Published: 21 November 2023

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CCS '23: ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

November 26 - 30, 2023

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Cited By

Liang WLiu YYang CXie SLi KSusilo W(2024)On Identity, Transaction, and Smart Contract Privacy on Permissioned and Permissionless Blockchain: A Comprehensive SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/367616456:12(1-35)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3676164

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