Paper 2024/122

SPRITE: Secure and Private Routing in Payment Channel Networks

Abstract

Payment channel networks are a promising solution to the scalability challenge of blockchains and are designed for significantly increased transaction throughput compared to the layer one blockchain. Since payment channel networks are essentially decentralized peer-to-peer networks, routing transactions is a fundamental challenge. Payment channel networks have some unique security and privacy requirements that make pathfinding challenging, for instance, network topology is not publicly known, and sender/receiver privacy should be preserved, in addition to providing atomicity guarantees for payments. In this paper, we present an efficient privacy-preserving routing protocol, SPRITE, for payment channel networks that supports concurrent transactions. By finding paths offline and processing transactions online, SPRITE can process transactions in just two rounds, which is more efficient compared to prior work. We evaluate SPRITE’s performance using Lightning Net- work data and prove its security using the Universal Composability framework. In contrast to the current cutting-edge methods that achieve rapid transactions, our approach significantly reduces the message complexity of the system by 3 orders of magnitude while maintaining similar latencies.