@InProceedings{10.1007/978-3-031-09234-3_37,
author="Dong, Yuhao
and Goldberg, Ian
and Gorbunov, Sergey
and Boutaba, Raouf",
editor="Ateniese, Giuseppe
and Venturi, Daniele",
title="Astrape: Anonymous Payment Channels with Boring Cryptography",
booktitle="Applied Cryptography  and Network Security",
year="2022",
publisher="Springer International Publishing",
address="Cham",
pages="748--768",
abstract="The increasing use of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin has run into inherent scalability limitations of blockchains. Payment channel networks, or PCNs, promise to greatly increase scalability by conducting the vast majority of transactions outside the blockchain while leveraging it as a final settlement protocol. Unfortunately, first-generation PCNs have significant privacy flaws. In particular, even though transactions are conducted off-chain, anonymity guarantees are very weak. In this work, we present Astrape, a novel PCN construction that achieves strong security and anonymity guarantees with simple, black-box cryptography, given a blockchain with flexible scripting. Existing anonymous PCN constructions often integrate with specific, often custom-designed, cryptographic constructions. But at a slight cost to asymptotic performance, Astrape can use any generic public-key signature scheme and any secure hash function, modeled as a random oracle, to achieve strong anonymity, by using a unique construction reminiscent of onion routing. This allows Astrape to achieve provable security that is ``generic'' over the computational hardness assumptions of the underlying primitives. Astrape's simple cryptography also lends itself to more straightforward security proofs compared to existing systems.",
isbn="978-3-031-09234-3"
}