A New Privacy-Preserving Payment Protocol for Blockchain Transactions

Abstract

Ring confidential transaction (RingCT) protocol is widely used in cryptocurrency to protect the privacy of both users’ identities and transaction amounts. Most recently, a new RingCT protocol (called RingCT 2.0) was proposed by leveraging cryptographic accumulators, which can achieve a constant-size output theoretically but still far from being practical due to the heavy zero-knowledge associated with the accumulator. In this article, we revisit the design of ring confidential transaction protocol and put forward a more efficient privacy-preserving payment protocol, which is built upon an extended version of one-out-of-many proof and a special multi-signature. Compared with previous works, the new protocol is not only more practical, but also does not suffer from a trusted setup. Besides, we show that the protocol satisfies the security requirements provided that the underlying cryptographic primitives are secure in the random oracle model. We implement our new payment protocol in Java, and the experimental results show that it is efficient enough to be used in practice.