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Researchers from the ‘Security and Privacy’ research unit of TU Wien (Lukas Aumayr and his thesis director Prof. Matteo Maffei) in collaboration with the IMDEA Software Institute (Prof. Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, previously postdoctoral fellow at the TU Wien) and Purdue University (Prof. Aniket Kate) have jointly developed a protocol that makes transactions more secure and faster in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Nowadays, in cities like Tokyo, we can subsist on cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Buying a coffee, shopping, taking the bus, paying for a taxi or even buying a meal are all accessible if you only have Bitcoin in your (electronic) wallet. It may seem strange for some European countries, even though there are many cryptocurrencies on the market, such as ATMs and coinradar (Spanish market), but we are moving at a constant speed towards this model which can or not coexist with our bank cards in the future. .
The popularity of cryptocurrencies is growing very rapidly due to the many advantages over, for example, Mastercard or Visa. Transactions are generally anonymous, decentralized and global.
But there is still work to be done when it comes to security, privacy and efficiency. Fraud may be possible, users may discover information about other users that should be kept secret, the number of transactions is limited, and delays sometimes occur.
Recognizing these issues, researchers at IMDEA Software Institute, TU Wien, and Purdue University have developed an improved protocol. The article, on which these ideas are based, will be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium 2021, one of the world’s leading IT security conferences.
The Bitcoin Bottleneck
“It has long been known that Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies have a scalability problem: there can only be a maximum of ten transactions per second,” Aumayr explains. “That’s very low compared to credit card companies, for example, which conduct tens of thousands of transactions per second around the world.” One approach to solving this problem is the “Lightning Network”, an additional network of payment channels between blockchain users. For example, if two people want to process many transactions in a short period of time, then they can exchange payments directly with each other, without each individual transaction being published on the blockchain. It is only at the beginning and at the end of this series of transactions that there is an official entry into the blockchain.
As other work by Moreno-Sanchez has shown), the apparent gain in Lightning Network privacy from off-chain payments is not real. In fact, previous work by Moreno-Sanchez has shown that payment intermediaries can learn who pays whom to what. This is an issue that needs to be addressed for a system like Lightning Network to be widely used.
A second big problem is that “furthermore, everyone in this chain has to contribute a certain amount of money, which is blocked as collateral. Sometimes a transaction fails, and then a lot of money can remain blocked for a relatively long time. long, the more people involved, the longer it will take, ”says Moreno-Sanchez.
Mathematically eliminate vulnerabilities
“This project has advanced the state of off-chain payments both in theory and in practice. From a theoretical point of view, we have provided a formal model of the new payment system, mathematically proving its correctness and security against an opponent. Lightning Network requires two communication cycles between all participants in a payment, Blitz (the new protocol) reduces it to one communication cycle. This is a landmark achievement from Lightning Network and other approaches proposed so far where all use two cycles and it was unknown if we could beat this barrier “in the words of the researcher from IMDEA Software.
“In practice, a single round of communication implies great advantages in terms of practicality”, explains Aumayr. “In the first round, the money is blocked, in the second round it is released or refunded if there were any problems. This could mean an additional day of delay. For each user of this chain. With our protocol, the chain of communication should only be browsed once “
Simulation proves practicality
However, it is not only the fundamental logical structure of the new protocol that is important, but also its practicality. Therefore, the team simulated in a network of payment channels the behavior of the new technology compared to the old Lightning network. The advantages of the new protocol have become particularly evident: depending on the situation, such as the number of attacks and fraud attempts, the new protocol results in a factor of 4 to 33 fewer failed transactions than with the traditional Lightning network.
Moreno-Sanchez and Aumayr are working to disseminate the results to developers at Lightning Network as well as other Bitcoin organizations. One of the most attractive points to date is that Blitz is fully backward compatible with currently deployed technologies and could be immediately deployed as a safer and faster alternative for off-chain payments.
New Protocol Makes Bitcoin Transactions More Secure and Faster Than Lightning
Provided by IMDEA Software Institute
Quote: A New Protocol for Faster, More Secure Crypto Transactions (2021, June 18) retrieved June 18, 2021 from https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-protocol-faster-safer-crypto-transactions. html
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