Paper 2016/575

TumbleBit: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub

Ethan Heilman, Leen Alshenibr, Foteini Baldimtsi, Alessandra Scafuro, and Sharon Goldberg

Abstract

This paper presents TumbleBit, a new unidirectional unlinkable payment hub that is fully compatible with today's Bitcoin protocol. TumbleBit allows parties to make fast, anonymous, off-blockchain payments through an untrusted intermediary called the Tumbler. TumbleBit's anonymity properties are similar to classic Chaumian eCash: no one, not even the Tumbler, can link a payment from its payer to its payee. Every payment made via TumbleBit is backed by bitcoins, and comes with a guarantee that Tumbler can neither violate anonymity, nor steal bitcoins, nor ``print money'' by issuing payments to itself. We prove the security of TumbleBit using the real/ideal world paradigm and the random oracle model. Security follows from the standard RSA assumption and ECDSA unforgeability. We implement TumbleBit, mix payments from 800 users and show that TumbleBit's off-blockchain payments can complete in seconds.

Note: Updated paper to highlight the fact that we only use the fact that RSA is permutation in our security proofs. Fixed typos in Figure 6.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
bitcoinanonymityfair exchangeecash
Contact author(s)
goldbe @ cs bu edu
History
2017-07-31: last of 5 revisions
2016-06-03: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/575
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/575,
      author = {Ethan Heilman and Leen Alshenibr and Foteini Baldimtsi and Alessandra Scafuro and Sharon Goldberg},
      title = {{TumbleBit}: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2016/575},
      year = {2016},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575}
}
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