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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
References
Canetti, R.: Universally composable security: a new paradigm for cryptographic protocols. In: 42nd FOCS, pp. 136–145. IEEE Computer Society Press (2001). https://doi.org/10.1109/SFCS.2001.959888
Canetti, R.: Universally composable signature, certification, and authentication. In: Proceedings. 17th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, 2004, pp. 219–233. IEEE (2004)
Canetti, R., Dodis, Y., Pass, R., Walfish, S.: Universally composable security with global setup. In: Vadhan, S.P. (ed.) TCC 2007. LNCS, vol. 4392, pp. 61–85. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70936-7_4
Chakravarty, M.M., Chapman, J., MacKenzie, K., Melkonian, O., Jones, M.P., Wadler, P.: The extended UTXO model. In: 4th Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts (2020)
Chakravarty, M.M., et al.: Hydra: Fast isomorphic state channels. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2020/299. https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/299
Croman, K., et al.: On scaling decentralized blockchains. In: Clark, J., Meiklejohn, S., Ryan, P.Y.A., Wallach, D., Brenner, M., Rohloff, K. (eds.) FC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9604, pp. 106–125. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_8
Decker, C., Wattenhofer, R.: A fast and scalable payment network with bitcoin duplex micropayment channels. In: Pelc, A., Schwarzmann, A.A. (eds.) SSS 2015. LNCS, vol. 9212, pp. 3–18. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21741-3_1
Dziembowski, S., Eckey, L., Faust, S., Malinowski, D.: PERUN: Virtual payment channels over cryptographic currencies. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2017/635 (2017). http://eprint.iacr.org/2017/635
Dziembowski, S., Faust, S., Hostáková, K.: General state channel networks. In: Lie, D., Mannan, M., Backes, M., Wang, X. (eds.) ACM CCS 2018, pp. 949–966. ACM Press (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3243734.3243856
Katz, J., Maurer, U., Tackmann, B., Zikas, V.: Universally composable synchronous computation. In: Sahai, A. (ed.) TCC 2013. LNCS, vol. 7785, pp. 477–498. Springer, Heidelberg (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36594-2_27
Kiayias, A., Litos, O.S.T.: A composable security treatment of the lightning network. IACR Cryptol. ePrint Archive 2019, 778 (2019)
Kiayias, A., Zhou, H.S., Zikas, V.: Fair and robust multi-party computation using a global transaction ledger. In: Fischlin, M., Coron, J.S. (eds.) Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 2016, pp. 705–734. Springer, Heidelberg (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49896-5_25
Malavolta, G., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Schneidewind, C., Kate, A., Maffei, M.: Anonymous multi-hop locks for blockchain scalability and interoperability. In: NDSS (2019)
PDecker, C., Russel, R., Osuntokun, O.: eltoo: A simple layer2 protocol for bitcoin. See https://blockstream.com/eltoo.pdf (2017)
Poon, J., Dryja, T.: The bitcoin lightning network: scalable off-chain instant payments. See https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf (2016)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
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.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65411-5_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-65410-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-65411-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)