T-Watch: Towards Timed Execution of Private Transaction in Blockchains

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Chao, Palanisamy, Balaji
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929343285952512
author Li, Chao
Palanisamy, Balaji
author_facet Li, Chao
Palanisamy, Balaji
contents In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, transactions represent the primary mechanism that the external world can use to trigger a change of blockchain state. Transactions serve as key sources of evidence and play a vital role in forensic analysis. Timed transaction refers to a specific class of service that enables a user to schedule a transaction to change the blockchain state during a chosen future time-frame. This paper proposes T-Watch, a decentralized and cost-efficient approach for users to schedule timed execution of any type of transaction in Ethereum with privacy guarantees. T-Watch employs a novel combination of threshold secret sharing and decentralized smart contracts. To protect the private elements of a scheduled transaction from getting disclosed before the future time-frame, T-Watch maintains shares of the decryption key of the scheduled transaction using a group of executors recruited in a blockchain network before the specified future time-frame and restores the scheduled transaction at a proxy smart contract to trigger the change of blockchain state at the required time-frame. To reduce the cost of smart contract execution in T-Watch, we carefully design the proposed protocol to run in an optimistic mode by default and then switch to a pessimistic mode once misbehaviors occur. Furthermore, the protocol supports users to form service request pooling to further reduce the gas cost. We rigorously analyze the security of T-Watch and implement the protocol over the Ethereum official test network. The results demonstrate that T-Watch is more scalable compared to the state of the art and could reduce the cost by over 90% through pooling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_08268
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle T-Watch: Towards Timed Execution of Private Transaction in Blockchains
Li, Chao
Palanisamy, Balaji
Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, transactions represent the primary mechanism that the external world can use to trigger a change of blockchain state. Transactions serve as key sources of evidence and play a vital role in forensic analysis. Timed transaction refers to a specific class of service that enables a user to schedule a transaction to change the blockchain state during a chosen future time-frame. This paper proposes T-Watch, a decentralized and cost-efficient approach for users to schedule timed execution of any type of transaction in Ethereum with privacy guarantees. T-Watch employs a novel combination of threshold secret sharing and decentralized smart contracts. To protect the private elements of a scheduled transaction from getting disclosed before the future time-frame, T-Watch maintains shares of the decryption key of the scheduled transaction using a group of executors recruited in a blockchain network before the specified future time-frame and restores the scheduled transaction at a proxy smart contract to trigger the change of blockchain state at the required time-frame. To reduce the cost of smart contract execution in T-Watch, we carefully design the proposed protocol to run in an optimistic mode by default and then switch to a pessimistic mode once misbehaviors occur. Furthermore, the protocol supports users to form service request pooling to further reduce the gas cost. We rigorously analyze the security of T-Watch and implement the protocol over the Ethereum official test network. The results demonstrate that T-Watch is more scalable compared to the state of the art and could reduce the cost by over 90% through pooling.
title T-Watch: Towards Timed Execution of Private Transaction in Blockchains
topic Cryptography and Security
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08268