PathShuffle: Credit Mixing and Anonymous Payments for Ripple

Moreno-Sanchez, Pedro; Ruffing, Tim; Kate, Aniket

doi:10.1515/popets-2017-0031

Cited by 17 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 26 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Ripple does not natively support atomic transactions with multiple sources and destinations, but native support could easily be added, similar to Stellar. Even without native support, a form of atomic payments can be added on top of Ripple using the PathJoin protocol [35]. However, to use this protocol to ensure transaction atomicity, service providers would need to interact with each other and would need to keep track of the ledger state.…”

Section: Atomic Transactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bitcontracts: Supporting Smart Contracts in Legacy Blockchains

Wüst

Diana²,

Kostiainen

et al. 2021

Proceedings 2021 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this paper, our main goal is to design a solution that adds expressive smart contract execution support as a subsystem to existing legacy blockchain systems. The primary usage of our solution is to enhance systems like Bitcoin that have no built-in smart contract capabilities. The secondary usage is to extend the contract execution capabilities of platforms like Ethereum that support contracts but have severe limitations on the complexity of allowed computations. Previous work. Recent research has explored different ways to add contract execution capabilities to blockchains. For instance, Arbitrum [25] and ACE [50] use off-chain execution models, where contract issuers appoint a set of managers who are responsible for executing the contract and communicating the results back to the chain. Hyperledger Fabric [5] uses a similar model in a permissioned setting with an execute-order-validate architecture in which transactions are executed before ordering. The main drawback of such solutions is that they are newly purpose-built systems, and therefore such systems cannot be deployed on legacy systems without modifying the underlying blockchain. Another proposal, FastKitten [16], relies on enclaved execution and collaterals, but only supports short-lived contracts that are restricted to known participants. In addition, such a system cannot tolerate enclave compromise. Recently discovered attacks [11], [45], [29], [13], [44] have shown that TEE compromise is a relevant threat. We discuss the limitations of previous solutions in more detail in Section II-B. Our solution. In this paper, we propose a novel system called Bitcontracts that adds expressive smart contract execution capabilities to legacy cryptocurrencies without requiring protocol changes to the legacy system, and overcomes the main limitations of previous solutions.

show abstract

Section: Atomic Transactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bitcontracts: Supporting Smart Contracts in Legacy Blockchains

Wüst

Diana²,

Kostiainen

et al. 2021

Proceedings 2021 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Multiple research works have shed light on various aspects of payment-channel networks, such as security [35], [39], [42], privacy [34], [38], [45], [46], concurrency [38], routing [37], [51], [54], [56], liquidity [23], [43], efficiency [24], [25], [57], interoperability [44] and incentive compatibility [29]. Most of these works lack a quantitative analysis of the impact of their findings in the current LN.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Quantitative Analysis of Security, Anonymity and Scalability for the Lightning Network

Tikhomirov

Moreno-Sanchez

Maffei

2020

2020 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW)

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Payment channel networks have been introduced to mitigate the scalability issues inherent to permissionless decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Launched in 2018, the Lightning Network (LN) has been gaining popularity and consists today of more than 5000 nodes and 35000 payment channels that jointly hold 965 bitcoins (9.2M USD as of June 2020). This adoption has motivated research from both academia and industry.Payment channels suffer from security vulnerabilities, such as the wormhole attack [39], anonymity issues [38], and scalability limitations related to the upper bound on the number of concurrent payments per channel [28], which have been pointed out by the scientific community but never quantitatively analyzed.In this work, we first analyze the proneness of the LN to the wormhole attack and attacks against anonymity. We observe that an adversary needs to control only 2% of nodes to learn sensitive payment information (e.g., sender, receiver, and amount) or to carry out the wormhole attack. Second, we study the management of concurrent payments in the LN and quantify its negative effect on scalability. We observe that for micropayments, the forwarding capability of up to 50% of channels is restricted to a value smaller than the channel capacity. This phenomenon hinders scalability and opens the door for denial-of-service attacks: we estimate that a network-wide DoS attack costs within 1.6M USD, while isolating the biggest community costs only 238k USD.Our findings should prompt the LN community to consider the issues studied in this work when educating users about path selection algorithms, as well as to adopt multi-hop payment protocols that provide stronger security, privacy and scalability guarantees.

show abstract

“…Their study links wallets that belong to the same user and deanonymizes the transactions associated with the main gateways. Their follow-up work [33] presents a pathmixing protocol to allow anonymous transactions in the Ripple network, thereby mitigating privacy breaches.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Among early academic efforts, Armknecht et al [1] and Di Luzio et al [25] present basic statistics of the Ripple network usage such as transaction volume, and consider the centralized nature of the Ripple blockchain consensus process respectively. Moreno-Sanchez et al [33,34] focus on deanonymization attacks and privacy enhancing solutions for users. Nevertheless, the Ripple network is yet to get its due attention similar to Bitcoin [2,6,10,27,44] from the academic community.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mind Your Credit

Moreno-Sanchez

Modi

Songhela

et al. 2018

Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference on World Wide Web - WWW '18

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Ripple credit network has emerged as a payment backbone with key advantages for financial institutions and the remittance industry. Its path-based IOweYou (IOU) settlements across different (crypto)currencies conceptually distinguishes the Ripple blockchain from cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin and altcoins), and makes it highly suitable to an orthogonal yet vast set of applications in the remittance world for cross-border transactions and beyond. This work studies the structure and evolution of the Ripple network since its inception, and investigates its vulnerability to devilry attacks that affect the IOU credit of linnet users' wallets. We find that about 13M USD are at risk in the current Ripple network due to inappropriate configuration of the rippling flag on credit links, facilitating undesired redistribution of credit across those links. Although the Ripple network has grown around a few highly connected hub (gateway) wallets that constitute the core of the network and provide high liquidity to users, such a credit link distribution results in a user base of around 112, 000 wallets that can be financially isolated by as few as 10 highly connected gateway wallets. Indeed, today about 4.9M USD cannot be withdrawn by their owners from the Ripple network due to PayRoutes, a gateway tagged as faulty by the Ripple community. Finally, we observe that stale exchange offers pose a real problem, and exchanges (market makers) have not always been vigilant about periodically updating their exchange offers according to current real-world exchange rates. For example, stale offers were used by 84 Ripple wallets to gain more than 4.5M USD from mid-July to mid-August 2017. Our findings should prompt the Ripple community to improve the health of the network by educating its users on increasing their connectivity, and by appropriately maintaining the credit limits, rippling flags, and exchange offers on their IOU credit links.

show abstract

PathShuffle: Credit Mixing and Anonymous Payments for Ripple

Cited by 17 publications

References 26 publications

Bitcontracts: Supporting Smart Contracts in Legacy Blockchains

Bitcontracts: Supporting Smart Contracts in Legacy Blockchains

A Quantitative Analysis of Security, Anonymity and Scalability for the Lightning Network

Mind Your Credit

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About