TSS-ZKP: Enabling Blockchain Account Supervision Without Compromising User Identity

Abstract

Performing effective supervision in blockchain networks while preserving public anonymity has long been a challenging issue. Existing solutions often depend on third-party institutions or dual-chain architectures to monitor and recover user identities, but these approaches pose significant risks, such as identity disclosure and increased inter-chain communication costs. To address these concerns, this paper proposes a novel supervised scheme based on Threshold Secret-Sharing (TSS) and Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) on anonymous accounts on the blockchain called TSS-ZKP, while integrating regulatory authority (RA) and multiple traceability centers (TC). Compared to traditional single RA, TSS-ZKP decentralizes the regulatory authority and storage across multiple TCs, significantly reducing the risk of user identity leakage by a single RA. By TSS-ZKP, user identities are recovered through the collaborative generation of sub-secrets by the RA and TCs, without storing actual identity information. By leveraging elliptic curves and using hash functions as secret labels, TSS-ZKP achieves lightweight operations, allowing TCs to efficiently locate sub-secrets without extensive traversal. The comprehensive analysis of security and privacy demonstrated that TSS-ZKP effectively safeguards user privacy while enabling feasible supervision. In addition, comparison experimental results show that the time consumption of the TSS-ZKP is about 30% of that of the comparison scheme. Meanwhile, the simulation results highlight the practicality of the scheme, showing that TSS-ZKP significantly reduces the delays in the identity recovery process while maintaining high usability. In general, TSS-ZKP provides a safer and more feasible solution for enabling the supervision of blockchain accounts.