Paper 2022/700
Grief-free Atomic Swaps
Abstract
Atomic Swaps enable exchanging crypto-assets without trusting a third party. To enable these swaps, both parties lock funds and let their counterparty withdraw them in exchange for a secret. This leads to the so-called griefing attack, or the emergence of an American Call option, where one party stops participating in the swap, thereby making their counterparty wait for a timelock to expire before they can withdraw their funds. The standard way to mitigate this attack is to make the attacker pay a premium for the emerging American Call option. In these premium-paying approaches, the premium itself ends up being locked for possibly an even longer duration than the swap amount itself. We propose a new Atomic Swap construction, where neither party exposes itself to a griefing attack by their counterparty. Notably, unlike previous constructions, ours can be implemented in Bitcoin as is. Our construction also takes fewer on-chain transactions and has a lower worst-case timelock.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Published elsewhere. ICBC 2022
- Keywords
- Bitcoin Atomic Swaps Griefing
- Contact author(s)
- tejaswin @ ethz ch
- History
- 2022-06-02: approved
- 2022-06-02: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2022/700
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/700,
author = {Tejaswi Nadahalli and Majid Khabbazian and Roger Wattenhofer},
title = {Grief-free Atomic Swaps},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/700},
year = {2022},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/700}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/700}
}
