Abstract
Payment channel path information includes node identity and balance. With this public information, an attacker can initiate a recurring transaction against the victim node, resulting in the victim node’s available balance being fully locked in the recurring transaction, thereby increasing the cost of collateral due to the longer lock time. The current solution primarily focuses on hiding the balance. However, it is not resistant to LockDown attacks because the attacker, as a payment sender, subjectively chooses a looped payment path to initiate a circular transaction. Additionally, existing solutions suffer from high deposit costs due to long loop paths. In this paper, we propose Epoch, a payment channel scheme whose core component is a new cryptographic primitive–optimal path encryption (OPE) protocol, which enables the concealment of path information. Specifically, the administrator uses a homomorphic one-way function to encrypt a payment path that satisfies the sender’s requirements, and the results in hiding path information such as the identity of the nodes in this path. This ensures that the sender does not steal information about the payment path in advance of adopting the payment path, and hence cannot initiate circular transactions. We give a security analysis of the OPE protocol in a universal composability (UC) framework, showing that the OPE protocol can hide path information and resist LockDown attacks. Furthermore, our scheme can process transactions in multiple hubs in parallel, which reduces the cost of collateralizing the deposit for transactions going through four Hubs by 75% compared to previous approaches.
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Acknowledgements
This study is supported by the Foundation of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.: 62072273, 61962009); The Major Basic Research Project of Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province of China (ZR2019ZD10); Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2019MF062); Shandong University Science and Technology Program Project (J18A326); Guangxi Key Laboratory of Cryptography and Information Security (No: GCIS202112); Foundation of Guizhou Provincial Key Laboratory of Public Big Data (No. 2019BD-KFJJ009); This work was supported by the Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province (No .2020B0101130015).
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Liu, M. et al. (2024). Epoch: Enabling Path Concealing Payment Channel Hubs with Optimal Path Encryption. In: Ge, C., Yung, M. (eds) Information Security and Cryptology. Inscrypt 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14526. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0942-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-0942-7_6
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