Glaeser, N., Maffei, M., Malavolta, G., Moreno-Sanchez, P., Tairi, E., & Thyagarajan, S. A. (2022). Foundations of Coin Mixing Services. In CCS ’22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (pp. 1259–1273). Association for Computing Machinery.
DOI: 10.34726/3601 Metadata
Abstract: Coin mixing services allow users to mix their cryptocurrency coins and thus enable unlinkable payments in a way that prevents tracking of honest users' coins by both the service provider and the users themselves. The easy bootstrapping of new users and backwards compatibility with cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin) with limited support for scripts are attractive features of this architecture, which has recently gained considerable attention in both academia and industry. A recent work of Tairi et al. [IEEE S&P 2021] formalizes the notion of a coin mixing service and proposes A2L, a new cryptographic protocol that simultaneously achieves high efficiency and interoperability. In this work, we identify a gap in their formal model and substantiate the issue by showing two concrete counterexamples: we show how to construct two encryption schemes that satisfy their definitions but lead to a completely insecure system. To amend this situation, we investigate secure constructions of coin mixing services. First, we develop the notion of blind conditional signatures (BCS), which acts as the cryptographic core for coin mixing services. We propose game-based security definitions for BCS and propose A2L+, a modified version of the protocol by Tairi et al. that satisfies our security definitions. Our analysis is in an idealized model (akin to the algebraic group model) and assumes the hardness of the one-more discrete logarithm problem. Finally, we propose A2L-UC, another construction of BCS that achieves the stronger notion of UC-security (in the standard model), albeit with a significant increase in computation cost. This suggests that constructing a coin mixing service protocol secure under composition requires more complex cryptographic machinery than initially thought.

Tairi, E., Moreno-Sanchez, P., & Maffei, M. (2021). Post-Quantum Adaptor Signature for Privacy-Preserving Off-Chain Payments. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security (pp. 131–150).
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_7 Metadata
Abstract: Adaptor signatures (AS) are an extension of digital signatures that enable the encoding of a cryptographic hard problem (e.g., discrete logarithm) within the signature itself. An AS scheme ensures that (i) the signature can be created only by the user knowing the solution to the cryptographic problem; (ii) the signature reveals the solution itself; (iii) the signature can be verified with the standard verification algorithm. These properties have made AS a salient building block for many blockchain applications, in particular, off-chain payment systems such as payment-channel networks, payment-channel hubs, atomic swaps or discrete log contracts. Current AS constructions, however, are not secure against adversaries with access to a quantum computer. In this work, we present IAS, a construction for adaptor signatures that relies on standard cryptographic assumptions for isogenies, and builds upon the isogeny-based signature scheme CSI-FiSh. We formally prove the security of IAS against a quantum adversary. We have implemented IAS and our evaluation shows that IAS can be incorporated into current blockchains while requiring ∼1500 bytes of storage size on-chain and ∼140 milliseconds for digital signature verification. We also show how IAS can be seamlessly leveraged to build post-quantum off-chain payment applications without harming their security and privacy.

Tairi, E., Moreno-Sanchez, P., & Maffei, M. (2021). A²L: Anonymous Atomic Locks for Scalability in Payment Channel Hubs. In 2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP). IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, USA, Non-EU.
DOI: 10.1109/sp40001.2021.00111 Metadata
Abstract: Payment channel hubs (PCHs) constitute a promising solution to the inherent scalability problems of blockchain technologies, allowing for off-chain payments between sender and receiver through an intermediary, called the tumbler. While state-of-the-art PCHs provide security and privacy guarantees against a malicious tumbler, they do so by relying on the scripting-based functionality available only at few cryptocurrencies, and they thus fall short of fundamental properties such as backwards compatibility and efficiency. In this work, we present Trilero, the first PCH protocol to achieve all aforementioned properties. Trilero builds upon A2L, a novel cryptographic primitive that realizes a three-party protocol for conditional transactions, where the tumbler pays the receiver only if the latter solves a cryptographic challenge with the help of the sender, which implies the sender has paid the tumbler. We prove the security and privacy guarantees of A2L (which carry over to Trilero) in the Universal Composability framework and present a provably secure instantiation based on adaptor signatures. We implemented A2L and compared it to TumbleBit, the state-of-the-art Bitcoin-compatible PCH. Asymptotically, A2L has a communication complexity that is constant, as opposed to linear in the security parameter like in TumbleBit. In practice, A2L requires ∼33x less bandwidth than TumleBit, while retaining the computational cost (or providing 2x speedup with a preprocessing technique). This demonstrates that A2L (and thus Trilero) is ready to be deployed today. In theory, we demonstrate for the first time that it is possible to design a secure and privacy-preserving PCH while requiring only digital signatures and timelock functionality from the underlying scripting language. In practice, this result makes Trilero backwards compatible with virtually all cryptocurrencies available today, even those offering a highly restricted form of scripting language such as Ripple or Stellar. The practical appealing of Trilero has resulted in a proof-of-concept implementation in the COMIT Network, a blockchain technology focused on cross-currency payments.

Cini, V., Ramacher, S., Slamanig, D., Striecks, C., & Tairi, E. (2021). Updatable Signatures and Message Authentication Codes. In Public-Key Cryptography – PKC 2021 (pp. 691–723). Springer, Cham.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-75245-3_25 Metadata ⯈Fulltext (preprint)
Abstract: Cryptographic objects with updating capabilities have been proposed by Bellare, Goldreich and Goldwasser (CRYPTO'94) under the umbrella of incremental cryptography. They have recently seen increased interest, motivated by theoretical questions (Ananth et al., EC'17) as well as concrete practical motivations (Lehmann et al., EC'18; Groth et al. CRYPTO'18; Kloo{\ss} et al., EC'19). In this work, the form of updatability we are particularly interested in is that primitives are key-updatable \textit{and} allow to update ``old" cryptographic objects, e.g., signatures or message authentication codes, from the ``old" key to the updated key at the same time without requiring full access to the new key (i.e., only via a so-called update token). Inspired by the rigorous study of updatable encryption by Lehmann and Tackmann (EC'18) and Boyd et al. (CRYPTO'20), we introduce a definitional framework for updatable signatures (USs) and message authentication codes (UMACs). We discuss several applications demonstrating that such primitives can be useful in practical applications, especially around key rotation in various domains, as well as serve as building blocks in other cryptographic schemes. We then turn to constructions and our focus there is on ones that are secure and practically efficient. In particular, we provide generic constructions from key-homomorphic primitives (signatures and PRFs) as well as direct constructions. This allows us to instantiate these primitives from various assumptions such as DDH or CDH (latter in bilinear groups), or the (R)LWE and the SIS assumptions. As an example, we obtain highly practical US schemes from BLS signatures or UMAC schemes from the Naor-Pinkas-Reingold PRF.