IACR News item: 19 May 2014
Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, Madars Virza
ePrint ReportIn this paper, we construct a full-fledged ledger-based digital currency with strong privacy guarantees. Our results leverage recent advances in zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs).
First, we formulate and construct decentralized anonymous payment schemes (DAP schemes). A DAP scheme enables users to directly pay each other privately: the corresponding transaction hides the payment\'s origin, destination, and transferred amount. We provide formal definitions and proofs of the construction\'s security.
Second, we build Zerocash, a practical instantiation of our DAP scheme construction. In Zerocash, transactions are less than 1 kB and take under 6 ms to verify --- orders of magnitude more efficient than the less-anonymous Zerocoin and competitive with plain Bitcoin.
Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.