Paper 2020/312

Arcturus: efficient proofs for confidential transactions

Sarang Noether

Abstract

Confidential transactions are used in distributed digital assets to demonstrate the balance of values hidden in commitments, while retaining signer ambiguity. Previous work describes a signer-ambiguous proof of knowledge of the opening of commitments to zero at the same index across multiple public commitment sets and the evaluation of a verifiable random function used as a linking tag, and uses this to build a linkable ring signature called Triptych that can be used as a building block for a confidential transaction model. In this work, we extend Triptych to build Arcturus, a proving system that proves knowledge of openings of multiple commitments to zero within a single set, correct construction of a verifiable random function evaluated at each opening, and value balance across a separate list of commitments within a single proof. While soundness depends on a novel dual discrete-logarithm hardness assumption, we use data from the Monero blockchain to show that Arcturus can be used in a confidential transaction model to provide faster total batch verification time than other state-of-the-art constructions without a trusted setup.

Note: Withdrawn after a failure of the novel hardness assumption was identified: https://github.com/UkoeHB/break-dual-target-dl