Ring Confidential Transactions

By Shen Noether, Adam Mackenzie. 2016

338 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article introduces a method of hiding transaction amounts in the strongly decentralized anonymous cryptocurrency Monero. Similar to Bitcoin, Monero is a cryptocurrency which is distributed through a proof-of-work “mining” process having no central party or trusted setup. The original Monero protocol was based on CryptoNote, which uses ring signatures and one-time keys to hide the destination and origin of transactions. Recently the technique of using a commitment scheme to hide the amount of a transaction has been discussed and implemented by Bitcoin Core developer Gregory Maxwell. In this article, a new type of ring signature, A Multilayered Linkable Spontaneous Anonymous Group signature is described which allows one to include a Pedersen Commitment in a ring signature. This construction results in a digital currency with hidden amounts, origins and destinations of transactions with reasonable efficiency and verifiable, trustless coin generation. The author would like to note that early drafts of this were publicized in the Monero Community and on the #bitcoin-wizards IRC channel. Blockchain hashed drafts are available showing that this work was started in Summer 2015, and completed in early October 2015. An eprint is also available at http://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098 .

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey of Blockchain Technology Applied to Smart Cities: Research Issues and Challenges (2019, methodology): “Monero [213], a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, uses Ring Confidential Transactions [214] which combine Confidential Transactions [211] with ring signatures to hide the senders’ addresses, the receivers’ addresses and the amount values of all transactions.”
Applications of Blockchains in the Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, background): “Linkable ring signatures is an upgraded version, that does not use signatures with a private key, but requires proof that the user is indeed part of the signing group of nodes [237].”
Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019, background): “Monero is based on CryptoNote and focuses on achieving strong privacy and anonymity by employing ring signatures for sender privacy, Ring Confidential Transactions [124] for amount obfuscation, and Stealth Addresses [125] for recipient privacy.”