DROPS

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.17

Non-Atomic Payment Splitting in Channel Networks

Authors: Stefan Dziembowski and Paweł Kędzior

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 282, 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023)

Abstract

Off-chain channel networks are one of the most promising technologies for dealing with blockchain scalability and delayed finality issues. Parties connected within such networks can send coins to each other without interacting with the blockchain. Moreover, these payments can be "routed" over the network. Thanks to this, even the parties that do not have a channel in common can perform payments between each other with the help of intermediaries. In this paper, we introduce a new notion that we call Non-Atomic Payment Splitting (NAPS) protocols that allow the intermediaries in the network to split the payments recursively into several subpayments in such a way that the payment can be successful "partially" (i.e. not all the requested amount may be transferred). This contrasts with the existing splitting techniques that are "atomic" in that they did not allow such partial payments (we compare the "atomic" and "non-atomic" approaches in the paper). We define NAPS formally and then present a protocol that we call "EthNA", that satisfies this definition. EthNA is based on very simple and efficient cryptographic tools; in particular, it does not use expensive cryptographic primitives. We implement a simple variant of EthNA in Solidity and provide some benchmarks. We also report on some experiments with routing using EthNA.

Cite as

Stefan Dziembowski and Paweł Kędzior. Non-Atomic Payment Splitting in Channel Networks. In 5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 282, pp. 17:1-17:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)

Copy BibTex To Clipboard

@InProceedings{dziembowski_et_al:LIPIcs.AFT.2023.17,
  author =	{Dziembowski, Stefan and K\k{e}dzior, Pawe{\l}},
  title =	{{Non-Atomic Payment Splitting in Channel Networks}},
  booktitle =	{5th Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2023)},
  pages =	{17:1--17:23},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-303-4},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{282},
  editor =	{Bonneau, Joseph and Weinberg, S. Matthew},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.17},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-192068},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.AFT.2023.17},
  annote =	{Keywords: Blockchain, Payment Channels Networks}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.10

Efficiently Testable Circuits

Authors: Mirza Ahad Baig, Suvradip Chakraborty, Stefan Dziembowski, Małgorzata Gałązka, Tomasz Lizurej, and Krzysztof Pietrzak

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 251, 14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023)

Abstract

In this work, we put forward the notion of "efficiently testable circuits" and provide circuit compilers that transform any circuit into an efficiently testable one. Informally, a circuit is testable if one can detect tampering with the circuit by evaluating it on a small number of inputs from some test set. Our technical contribution is a compiler that transforms any circuit C into a testable circuit (Ĉ,𝕋̂) for which we can detect arbitrary tampering with all wires in Ĉ. The notion of a testable circuit is weaker or incomparable to existing notions of tamper-resilience, which aim to detect or even correct for errors introduced by tampering during every query, but our new notion is interesting in several settings, and we achieve security against much more general tampering classes - like tampering with all wires - with very modest overhead. Concretely, starting from a circuit C of size n and depth d, for any L (think of L as a small constant, say L = 4), we get a testable (Ĉ,𝕋̂) where Ĉ is of size ≈ 12n and depth d+log(n)+L⋅ n^{1/L}. The test set 𝕋̂ is of size 4⋅ 2^L. The number of extra input and output wires (i.e., pins) we need to add for the testing is 3+L and 2^L, respectively.

Cite as

Mirza Ahad Baig, Suvradip Chakraborty, Stefan Dziembowski, Małgorzata Gałązka, Tomasz Lizurej, and Krzysztof Pietrzak. Efficiently Testable Circuits. In 14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 251, pp. 10:1-10:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)

Copy BibTex To Clipboard

@InProceedings{baig_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.10,
  author =	{Baig, Mirza Ahad and Chakraborty, Suvradip and Dziembowski, Stefan and Ga{\l}\k{a}zka, Ma{\l}gorzata and Lizurej, Tomasz and Pietrzak, Krzysztof},
  title =	{{Efficiently Testable Circuits}},
  booktitle =	{14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023)},
  pages =	{10:1--10:23},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-263-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{251},
  editor =	{Tauman Kalai, Yael},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.10},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-175130},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.10},
  annote =	{Keywords: circuit compilers, circuit integrity, circuit testing}
}

Document

DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.72

Lower Bounds for Off-Chain Protocols: Exploring the Limits of Plasma

Authors: Stefan Dziembowski, Grzegorz Fabiański, Sebastian Faust, and Siavash Riahi

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 185, 12th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2021)

Abstract

Blockchain is a disruptive new technology introduced around a decade ago. It can be viewed as a method for recording timestamped transactions in a public database. Most of blockchain protocols do not scale well, i.e., they cannot process quickly large amounts of transactions. A natural idea to deal with this problem is to use the blockchain only as a timestamping service, i.e., to hash several transactions tx_1,…,tx_m into one short string, and just put this string on the blockchain, while at the same time posting the hashed transactions tx_1,…,tx_m to some public place on the Internet ("off-chain"). In this way the transactions tx_i remain timestamped, but the amount of data put on the blockchain is greatly reduced. This idea was introduced in 2017 under the name Plasma by Poon and Buterin. Shortly after this proposal, several variants of Plasma have been proposed. They are typically built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, as they strongly rely on so-called smart contracts (in order to resolve disputes between the users if some of them start cheating). Plasmas are an example of so-called off-chain protocols. In this work we initiate the study of the inherent limitations of Plasma protocols. More concretely, we show that in every Plasma system the adversary can either (a) force the honest parties to communicate a lot with the blockchain, even though they did not intend to (this is traditionally called mass exit); or (b) an honest party that wants to leave the system needs to quickly communicate large amounts of data to the blockchain. What makes these attacks particularly hard to handle in real life is that these attacks do not have so-called uniquely attributable faults, i.e. the smart contract cannot determine which party is malicious, and hence cannot force it to pay the fees for the blockchain interaction. An important implication of our result is that the benefits of two of the most prominent Plasma types, called Plasma Cash and Fungible Plasma, cannot be achieved simultaneously. Besides of the direct implications on real-life cryptocurrency research, we believe that this work may open up a new line of theoretical research, as, up to our knowledge, this is the first work that provides an impossibility result in the area of off-chain protocols.

Cite as

Stefan Dziembowski, Grzegorz Fabiański, Sebastian Faust, and Siavash Riahi. Lower Bounds for Off-Chain Protocols: Exploring the Limits of Plasma. In 12th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2021). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 185, pp. 72:1-72:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021)

Copy BibTex To Clipboard

@InProceedings{dziembowski_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.72,
  author =	{Dziembowski, Stefan and Fabia\'{n}ski, Grzegorz and Faust, Sebastian and Riahi, Siavash},
  title =	{{Lower Bounds for Off-Chain Protocols: Exploring the Limits of Plasma}},
  booktitle =	{12th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2021)},
  pages =	{72:1--72:20},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-177-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{185},
  editor =	{Lee, James R.},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.72},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-136113},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2021.72},
  annote =	{Keywords: blockchain, lower bounds, off-chain protocol, commit chain, plasma}
}

Search Results

Documents authored by Dziembowski, Stefan

Non-Atomic Payment Splitting in Channel Networks

Abstract

Cite as

Efficiently Testable Circuits

Abstract

Cite as

Lower Bounds for Off-Chain Protocols: Exploring the Limits of Plasma

Abstract

Cite as

Thanks for your feedback!

Could not send message