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.
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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.
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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
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