TY - GEN
T1 - Counter-collusion smart contracts for watchtowers in payment channel networks
AU - Zhang, Yuhui
AU - Yang, Dejun
AU - Xue, Guoliang
AU - Yu, Ruozhou
N1 - Funding Information:
Zhang and Yang are affiliated with Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO 80401. Xue is affiliated with Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287. Yu is affiliated with North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695. Email:{yuhzhang, djyang}@mines.edu, xue@asu.edu, ryu5@ncsu.edu This research was supported in part by NSF grants 1717197, 1717315, 2007083, 2007391, and 2008935. The information reported here does not reflect the position or the policy of the federal government.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.
PY - 2021/5/10
Y1 - 2021/5/10
N2 - Payment channel networks (PCNs) are proposed to improve the cryptocurrency scalability by settling off-chain transactions. However, PCN introduces an undesirable assumption that a channel participant must stay online and be synchronized with the blockchain to defend against frauds. To alleviate this issue, watchtowers have been introduced, such that a hiring party can employ a watchtower to monitor the channel for fraud. However, a watchtower might profit from colluding with a cheating counterparty and fail to perform this job. Existing solutions either focus on heavy cryptographic techniques or require a large collateral. In this work, we leverage smart contracts through economic approaches to counter collusions for watchtowers in PCNs. This brings distrust between the watchtower and the counterparty, so that rational parties do not collude or cheat. We provide detailed analyses on the contracts and rigorously prove that the contracts are effective to counter collusions with minimal on-chain operations. In particular, a watchtower only needs to lock a small collateral, which incentivizes participation of watchtowers and users. We also provide an implementation of the contracts in Solidity and execute them on Ethereum to demonstrate the scalability and efficiency of the contracts.
AB - Payment channel networks (PCNs) are proposed to improve the cryptocurrency scalability by settling off-chain transactions. However, PCN introduces an undesirable assumption that a channel participant must stay online and be synchronized with the blockchain to defend against frauds. To alleviate this issue, watchtowers have been introduced, such that a hiring party can employ a watchtower to monitor the channel for fraud. However, a watchtower might profit from colluding with a cheating counterparty and fail to perform this job. Existing solutions either focus on heavy cryptographic techniques or require a large collateral. In this work, we leverage smart contracts through economic approaches to counter collusions for watchtowers in PCNs. This brings distrust between the watchtower and the counterparty, so that rational parties do not collude or cheat. We provide detailed analyses on the contracts and rigorously prove that the contracts are effective to counter collusions with minimal on-chain operations. In particular, a watchtower only needs to lock a small collateral, which incentivizes participation of watchtowers and users. We also provide an implementation of the contracts in Solidity and execute them on Ethereum to demonstrate the scalability and efficiency of the contracts.
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U2 - 10.1109/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488831
DO - 10.1109/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488831
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85111942241
T3 - Proceedings - IEEE INFOCOM
BT - INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 40th IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, INFOCOM 2021
Y2 - 10 May 2021 through 13 May 2021
ER -