Publication Date

5-2020

Date of Final Oral Examination (Defense)

3-13-2020

Type of Culminating Activity

Thesis

Degree Title

Master of Science in Computer Science

Department

Computer Science

Major Advisor

Gaby Dagher, Ph.D.

Advisor

Hoda Mehrpouyan, Ph.D.

Advisor

Casey Kennington, Ph.D.

Abstract

Atomic swap facilitates fair exchange of cryptocurrencies without the need for a trusted authority. It is regarded as one of the prominent technologies for the cryptocurrency ecosystem, helping to realize the idea of a decentralized blockchain introduced by Bitcoin. However, due to the heterogeneity of the cryptocurrency systems, developing efficient and privacy-preserving atomic swap protocols has proven challenging. In this thesis, we propose a generic framework for atomic swap, called PolySwap, that enables fair ex-change of assets between two heterogeneous sets of blockchains. Our construction 1) does not require a trusted third party, 2) preserves the anonymity of the swap by preventing transactions from being linked or distinguished, and 3) does not require any scripting capability in blockchain. To achieve our goal, we introduce a novel secret sharing signature(SSSig) scheme to remove the necessity of common interfaces between blockchains in question. These secret sharing signatures allow an arbitrarily large number of signatures to be bound together such that the release of any single transaction on one blockchain opens the remaining transactions for the other party, allowing multi-chain atomic swaps while still being indistinguishable from a standard signature. We provide construction details of secret sharing signatures for ECDSA, Schnorr, and CryptoNote-style Ring signatures. Additionally, we provide an alternative contingency protocol, allowing parties to exchange to and from blockchains that do not support any form of time-locked escape transactions. A successful execution of PolySwap shows that it takes 8.3 seconds to complete an atomic swap between Bitcoin’s Testnet3 and Ethereum’s Rinkeby (excluding confirmation time).

DOI

10.18122/td/1656/boisestate

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