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
HawkPrivate Smart ContractsMulti-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
Creative Commons Attribution
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}
}
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