Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin

Sasson, Eli Ben and Chiesa, Alessandro and Garman, Christina and Green, Matthew and Miers, Ian and Tromer, Eran and Virza, Madars (2014) Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin. In: 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

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Abstract

Bit coin is the first digital currency to see widespread adoption. While payments are conducted between pseudonyms, Bit coin cannot offer strong privacy guarantees: payment transactions are recorded in a public decentralized ledger, from which much information can be deduced. Zero coin (Miers et al., IEEE S&P 2013) tackles some of these privacy issues by unlinking transactions from the payment's origin. Yet, it still reveals payments' destinations and amounts, and is limited in functionality. In this paper, we construct a full-fledged ledger-based digital currency with strong privacy guarantees. Our results leverage recent advances in zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs). First, we formulate and construct decentralized anonymous payment schemes (DAP schemes). A DAP scheme enables users to directly pay each other privately: the corresponding transaction hides the payment's origin, destination, and transferred amount. We provide formal definitions and proofs of the construction's security. Second, we build Zero cash, a practical instantiation of our DAP scheme construction. In Zero cash, transactions are less than 1 kB and take under 6 ms to verify - orders of magnitude more efficient than the less-anonymous Zero coin and competitive with plain Bit coin.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects: Main Topics > Bitcoin
Projects > BloSSom 2019
Main Topics > Crypto Currency
Main Topics > Privacy
Depositing User: Unnamed user with email richard.dabels@uni-rostock.de
Date Deposited: 09 Sep 2019 15:25
Last Modified: 09 Sep 2019 15:25
URI: http://blossom.informatik.uni-rostock.de/id/eprint/101

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