Abstract
Improving the throughput of blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum has been an important research problem. Off-chain payments are one of the most promising technologies to tackle this challenge. Once a payment channel, however, is established there exists a strict one-one correspondence between a payee and prepayments, which reduces the flexibility of off-chain payments. In this paper, we propose a flexible instant payment system (FIPS) based on blockchain to improve the flexibility of off-chain payments. In the FIPS system, there exists a depositor who locks enough amounts of tokens on the chain, and supervises payers to make off-chain payments. Therefore, payers can pay to multiple payees off-chain without double-spending. Even the depositor colludes with the payer, and performs double-spending attacks, payees will not suffer any losses as they can withdraw their tokens from the locked tokens of the depositor. Besides, payers can allocate flexibly the prepayments off-chain, and all transactions are settled off-chain. We present a formal generic construction for the FIPS system, prove its security strictly, analyze its related properties, and compare with related schemes in detail. Analyses show that our scheme is flexible and practical.
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
References
Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system[/OL] (2008). http://digitalasc.com/download/blockchain_whitepaper.pdf
Wood, G.: Ethereum: a secure decentralised generalised transaction ledger. Ethereum Proj. Yellow Pap. 151, 1–32 (2014)
Pass, R., et al.: Micropayments for decentralized currencies. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 207–218 (2015)
Trillo, M.: Stress test prepares VisaNet for the most wonderful time of the year[/OL] (2013). https://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2013/10/10/stress-test-prepares-visanet-for-the-most-wonderful-time-of-the-year/index.html
Luu L., Narayanan V., Baweja K, et al.: SCP: a computationally-scalable byzantine consensus protocol for blockchains, p. 1168 (2015)
Kogias, E.K., Jovanovic, P., Gailly, N., et al.: Enhancing bitcoin security and performance with strong consistency via collective signing. In: 25th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 16), pp. 279–296 (2016)
Eyal, I., Gencer, A.E., Sirer, E.G., et al.: Bitcoin-NG: a scalable blockchain protocol. In: NSDI, pp. 45–59 (2016)
Pass, R., Shi, E.: Hybrid consensus: efficient consensus in the permissionless model. In: LIPIcs-Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, vol. 91 (2017)
Bentov, I., Kumaresan, R., Miller, A.: Instantaneous decentralized poker. In: Takagi, T., Peyrin, T. (eds.) ASIACRYPT 2017. LNCS, vol. 10625, pp. 410–440. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70697-9_15
Lind, J., Eyal, I., Kelbert, F., et al.: Teechain: scalable blockchain payments using trusted execution environments. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.05454 (2017)
Malavolta, G., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Kate, A., et al.: Concurrency and privacy with payment-channel networks. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 455–471 (2017)
Roos, S., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Kate, A., et al.: Settling payments fast and private: efficient decentralized routing for path-based transactions. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.05748 (2017)
Miller, A., Bentov, I., Kumaresan, R., et al.: Sprites: payment channels that go faster than lightning. CoRR abs/1702.05812 (2017)
Anon: Ripple protocol[/OL]. https://ripple.com/
Anon: Stellar protocol[/OL]. https://www.stellar.org/
Dandekar, P., Goel, A., Govindan, R., et al.: Liquidity in credit networks: a little trust goes a long way. In: Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, pp. 147–156 (2011)
Moreno-Sanchez, P., Modi, N., Songhela, R., et al.: Mind your credit: assessing the health of the ripple credit network. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.02358 (2017)
Dandekar, P., Goel, A., Wellman, M.P., et al.: Strategic formation of credit networks. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. (TOIT) 15(1), 3 (2015)
Post, A., Shah, V., Mislove, A.: Bazaar: strengthening user reputations in online marketplaces. In: Proceedings of NSDI 2011: 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, p. 183 (2011)
Viswanath, B., Mondal, M., Gummadi, K.P., et al.: Canal: scaling social network-based sybil tolerance schemes. In: Proceedings of the 7th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems, pp. 309–322 (2012)
Moreno-Sanchez, P., Kate, A., Maffei, M., et al.: Privacy preserving payments in credit networks. In: Network and Distributed Security Symposium (2015)
Moreno-Sanchez, P., Zafar, M.B., Kate, A.: Listening to whispers of ripple: linking wallets and deanonymizing transactions in the ripple network. Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol. 2016(4), 436–453 (2016)
Sun, S.-F., Au, M.H., Liu, J.K., Yuen, T.H.: RingCT 2.0: a compact accumulator-based (linkable ring signature) protocol for blockchain cryptocurrency monero. In: Foley, S.N., Gollmann, D., Snekkenes, E. (eds.) ESORICS 2017. LNCS, vol. 10493, pp. 456–474. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66399-9_25
Decker, C., Wattenhofer, R.: A fast and scalable payment network with bitcoin duplex micropayment channels. In: Symposium on Self-Stabilizing Systems, pp. 3–18 (2015)
Poon, J., Dryja, T.: The bitcoin lightning network: scalable off-chain instant payments[/OL] (2016). https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf
Anon: Thunder network[/OL]. https://github.com/blockchain/thunder
Anon: Eclair implementationof the lightning network[/OL]. https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair
Prihodko, P., Zhigulin, S., Sahno, M., et al.: Flare: an approach to routing in lightning network[/OL] (2016). https://bitfury.com/content/downloads/whitepaper_flare_an_approach_to_routing_in_lightning_network_7_7_2016.pdf
Anon: Raiden network[/OL]. https://raiden.network/
Khalil, R., Gervais, A.: Revive: rebalancing off-blockchain payment networks. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 439–453 (2017)
Dziembowski, S., Faust, S., Hostáková, K.: General state channel networks. In: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 949–966 (2018)
David, B., Gaži, P., Kiayias, A., Russell, A.: Ouroboros praos: an adaptively-secure, semi-synchronous proof-of-stake blockchain. In: Nielsen, J.B., Rijmen, V. (eds.) EUROCRYPT 2018. LNCS, vol. 10821, pp. 66–98. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78375-8_3
Larimer, D.: Delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS). Bitshare whitepaper (2014)
Acknowledgements
This paper is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China through project 2017YFB0802500, by the National Cryptography Development Fund through project MMJJ20170106, by the foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory through project 61421120305162112006, the Natural Science Foundation of China through projects 61772538, 61672083, 61532021, 61472429, 91646203 and 61402029. This paper is also partially funded by Cryptape.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Zhong, L., Wang, H., Xie, J., Qin, B., Liu, J.K., Wu, Q. (2019). A Flexible Instant Payment System Based on Blockchain. In: Jang-Jaccard, J., Guo, F. (eds) Information Security and Privacy. ACISP 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11547. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21548-4_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21548-4_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-21547-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-21548-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)