zkHawk: Practical Private Smart Contracts from MPC-based Hawk

Aritra Banerjee; Michael Clear; Hitesh Tewari

Paper 2021/501

zkHawk: Practical Private Smart Contracts from MPC-based Hawk

Aritra Banerjee, Michael Clear, and Hitesh Tewari

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies have received a lot of research attention in recent years following the release of the first cryptocurrency Bitcoin. With the rise in cryptocurrency transactions, the need for smart contracts has also increased. Smart contracts, in a nutshell, are digitally executed contracts wherein some parties execute a common goal. The main problem with most of the current smart contracts is that there is no privacy for a party's input to the contract from either the blockchain or the other parties. Our research builds on the Hawk project that provides transaction privacy along with support for smart contracts. However, Hawk relies on a special trusted party known as a manager, which must be trusted not to leak each party's input to the smart contract. In this paper, we present a practical private smart contract protocol that replaces the manager with an MPC protocol such that the function to be executed by the MPC protocol is relatively lightweight, involving little overhead added to the smart contract function, and uses practical sigma protocols and homomorphic commitments to prove to the blockchain that the sum of the incoming balances to the smart contract matches the sum of the outgoing balances.

Note: Extended Version of the IEEE BRAINS'21 Conference Paper

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Major revision. IEEE BRAINS'21 Conference Proceedings
Keywords: Hawk Private Smart Contracts Multi-Party Computation
Contact author(s): abanerje @ tcd ie
History: 2021-06-23: last of 6 revisions; 2021-04-19: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2021/501
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2021/501,
      author = {Aritra Banerjee and Michael Clear and Hitesh Tewari},
      title = {{zkHawk}: Practical Private Smart Contracts from {MPC}-based Hawk},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2021/501},
      year = {2021},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/501}
}