Linkable group signatures against malicious regulators for regulated privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies

Abstract

With the emergence of illegal behaviors such as money laundering and extortion, the regulation of privacy-preserving cryptocurrency has become increasingly important. However, existing regulated privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies usually rely on a single regulator, which seriously threatens users’ privacy once the regulator is corrupt. To address this issue, we propose a linkable group signature against malicious regulators (ALGS) for regulated privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies. Specifically, a set of regulators work together to regulate users’ behavior during cryptocurrencies transactions. Even if a certain number of regulators are corrupted, our scheme still ensures the identity security of a legal user. Meanwhile, our scheme can prevent double-spending during cryptocurrency transactions. We first propose the model of ALGS and define its security properties. Then, we present a concrete construction of ALGS, which provides CCA-2 anonymity, traceability, non-frameability, and linkability. We finally evaluate our ALGS scheme and report its advantages by comparing other schemes. The implementation result shows that the runtime of our signature algorithm is reduced by 17% compared to Emura et al. (2017) and 49% compared to KSS19 (Krenn et al. 2019), while the verification time is reduced by 31% compared to Emura et al. and 47% compared to KSS19.

Keywords

Privacy protection / Blockchain / Linkable group signatures / Against malicious regulator

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Xiao Wang: Writing - original draft. Yanqi Zhao: Writing - original draft, Formal analysis. Lingyue Zhang: Writing - original draft. Min Xie: Writing - original draft. Yong Yu: Writing - review & editing. Huilin Li: Writing - review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to 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), The Youth Innovation Team of Shaanxi Universities (24JP180).

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