Stealth Address and Key Management Techniques in Blockchain Systems

Abstract

Bitcoin is an open source payment system with a market capitalization of about 15 G$. During the years several key management solutions have been proposed to enhance bitcoin. The common characteristic of these techniques is that they allow to derive public keys independently of the private keys, and that these keys match. In this paper we overview the historical development of such techniques, specify and compare all major variants proposed or used in practical systems. We show that such techniques can be designed based on 2 distinct ECC arithmetic properties and how to combine both. A major trend in blockchain systems is to use by Stealth Address (SA) techniques to make different payments made to the same payee unlikable. We review all known SA techniques and show that early variants are less secure. Finally we propose a new SA method which is more robust against leakage and against various attacks.