Redactable Blockchain from Accountable Weight Threshold Chameleon Hash

Abstract

The redactable blockchain provides the editability of blocks, which guarantees the data immutability of blocks while removing illegal content on the blockchain. However, the existing redactable blockchain relies on trusted assumptions regarding a single editing authority. Ateniese et al. (EuroS&P 2017) and Li et al. (TIFS 2023) proposed solutions by using threshold chameleon hash functions, but these lack accountability for malicious editing. This paper delves into this problem and proposes an accountability weight threshold blockchain editing scheme. Specifically, we first formalize the model of a redactable blockchain with accountability. Then, we introduce the novel concept of the Accountable Weight Threshold Chameleon Hash Function (AWTCH). This function collaboratively generates a chameleon hash trapdoor through a weight committee protocol, where only sets of committees meeting the weight threshold can edit data. Additionally, it incorporates a tracer to identify and hold accountable any disputing editors, thus enabling supervision of editing rights. We propose a generic construction for AWTCH. Then, we introduce an efficient construction of AWTCH and develop a redactable blockchain scheme by leveraging AWTCH. Finally, we demonstrate our scheme’s practicality. The editing efficiency of our scheme is twice that of Tian et al. (TIFS 2023) with the same number of editing blocks.

Keywords

Redactable blockchain / Chameleon hash / Accountability / Threshold

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Qiang Ma: Writing - original draft. Yanqi Zhao: Writing - original draft. Xiangyu Liu: Writing - original draft. Xiaoyi Yang: Writing - review & editing, Project administration. Min Xie: Formal analysis, Data curation. Yong Yu: Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appearedto influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFB2701500), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62272385, 62202375), Shaanxi Distinguished Youth Project (2022JC-47), the Major Program of Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation for the Fundamental Research (ZR2022ZD03), the Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi (2024GX-ZDCYL-01-09, 2024GX-ZDCYL-01-15), Young Talent Fund of Association for Science and Technology in Shaanxi, China (20220134).

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