CryptoMaze: Privacy-Preserving Splitting of Off-Chain Payments - Subhra Mazumdar
Channel: Protocol Labs
Date: 28/03/2022

Subhra Mazumdar received her M.Tech degree in Computer Science from Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, India. Currently, she is pursuing her Ph.D. in the same institute, working on secure off-chain transactions in Payment Channel Networks. Her research interests are in Scalability and Privacy in Blockchain, Data Privacy, and Combinatorial Optimization. Prior to this, she has completed her B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Durgapur, India and worked as a Systems Engineer at TCS Innovation Labs, India. 

Payment Channel Networks or PCNs solve the problem of scalability in Blockchain by executing payments off-chain. Due to a lack of sufficient capacity in the network, high-valued payments are split and routed via multiple paths. Existing multi-path payment protocols either fail to achieve atomicity or are susceptible to wormhole attack. We propose a secure and privacy-preserving atomic multi-path payment protocol CryptoMaze. Our protocol avoids the formation of multiple off-chain contracts on edges shared by the paths routing partial payments. It also guarantees unlinkability between partial payments. We provide a formal definition of the protocol in the Universal Composability framework and analyze the security. We implement CryptoMaze on several instances of Lightning Network and simulated networks. Our protocol requires 11s for routing a payment of 0.04 BTC on a network instance comprising 25600 nodes. The communication cost is less than 1MB in the worst-case. On comparing the performance of CryptoMaze with several state-of-the-art payment protocols, we observed that our protocol outperforms the rest in terms of computational cost and has a feasible communication overhead.

Related paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9705551/authors#authors
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