Paper 2019/1330

OptiSwap: Fast Optimistic Fair Exchange

Lisa Eckey, Sebastian Faust, and Benjamin Schlosser

Abstract

Selling digital commodities securely over the Internet is a challenging task when Seller and Buyer do not trust each other. With the advent of cryptocurrencies, one prominent solution for digital exchange is to rely on a smart contract as a trusted arbiter that fairly resolves disputes when Seller and Buyer disagree. Such protocols have an optimistic mode, where the digital exchange between the parties can be completed with only minimal interaction with the smart contract. In this work we present OptiSwap, a new smart contract based fair exchange protocol that significantly improves the optimistic case of smart contract based fair exchange protocols. In particular, OptiSwap has almost no overhead in communication complexity, and improves on the computational overheads of the parties compared to prior solutions. An additional feature of OptiSwap is a protection mechanism against so-called grieving attacks, where an adversary attempts to violate the financial fairness of the protocol by forcing the honest party to pay fees. We analyze OptiSwap's security in the UC model and provide benchmark results over Ethereum.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. ACM ASIA CCS'20
DOI
10.1145/3320269.3384749
Keywords
fairnesscryptocurrencysmart contractfair exchangee-commercedispute resolutionoptimisticinteractive
Contact author(s)
lisa eckey @ tu-darmstadt de
sebastian faust @ tu-darmstadt de
benjamin schlosser @ tu-darmstadt de
History
2020-03-20: revised
2019-11-19: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2019/1330
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2019/1330,
      author = {Lisa Eckey and Sebastian Faust and Benjamin Schlosser},
      title = {{OptiSwap}: Fast Optimistic Fair Exchange},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2019/1330},
      year = {2019},
      doi = {10.1145/3320269.3384749},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1330}
}
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