Abstract
Decentralized and permissionless ledgers offer an inherently low transaction rate, as a result of their consensus protocol demanding the storage of each transaction on-chain. A prominent proposal to tackle this scalability issue is to utilize off-chain protocols, where parties only need to post a limited number of transactions on-chain. Existing solutions can roughly be categorized into: (i) application-specific channels (e.g., payment channels), offering strictly weaker functionality than the underlying blockchain; and (ii) state channels, supporting arbitrary smart contracts at the cost of being compatible only with the few blockchains having Turing-complete scripting languages (e.g., Ethereum). In this work, we introduce and formalize the notion of generalized channels allowing users to perform any operation supported by the underlying blockchain in an off-chain manner. Generalized channels thus extend the functionality of payment channels and relax the definition of state channels. We present a concrete construction compatible with any blockchain supporting transaction authorization, time-locks and constant number of Boolean ∧ and ∨ operations – requirements fulfilled by many (non-Turing-complete) blockchains including the popular Bitcoin. To this end, we leverage adaptor signatures – a cryptographic primitive already used in the cryptocurrency literature but formalized as a standalone primitive in this work for the first time. We formally prove the security of our generalized channel construction in the Universal Composability framework. As an important practical contribution, our generalized channel construction outperforms the state-of-the-art payment channel construction, the Lightning Network, in efficiency. Concretely, it halves the off-chain communication complexity and reduces the on-chain footprint in case of disputes from linear to constant in the number of off-chain applications funded by the channel. Finally, we evaluate the practicality of our construction via a prototype implementation and discuss various applications including financially secured fair two-party computation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Advances in Cryptology – ASIACRYPT 2021 - 27th International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, Proceedings, Part 2 |
| Editors | Mehdi Tibouchi, Huaxiong Wang |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Pages | 635-664 |
| Number of pages | 30 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9783030920746 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2021 |
| Event | 27th International Conference on Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, ASIACRYPT 2021 - Virtual, Online Duration: 6 Dec 2021 → 10 Dec 2021 |
Publication series
| Name | Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) |
|---|---|
| Volume | 13091 LNCS |
| ISSN (Print) | 0302-9743 |
| ISSN (Electronic) | 1611-3349 |
Conference
| Conference | 27th International Conference on Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, ASIACRYPT 2021 |
|---|---|
| City | Virtual, Online |
| Period | 6/12/21 → 10/12/21 |
Bibliographical note
Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-careOtherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.
Keywords
- Adaptor signatures
- Blockchain
- Off-chain protocols and channels