TY - GEN
T1 - Bitcoin covenants
AU - Möser, Malte
AU - Eyal, Ittay
AU - Sirer, Emin Gün
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © International Financial Cryptography Association 2016.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - This paper presents an extension to Bitcoin’s script language enabling covenants, a primitive that allows transactions to restrict how the value they transfer is used in the future. Covenants expand the set of financial instruments expressible in Bitcoin, and enable new powerful and novel use cases. We illustrate two novel security constructs built using covenants. The first, vaults, focuses on improving the security of private cryptographic keys. Historically, maintaining these keys securely and reliably has been a critical vulnerability for Bitcoin users.We show how covenants enable vaults, which disincentivize key theft by preventing an attacker from gaining full access to stolen funds. The second construct, poison transactions, is a generally useful mechanism for penalizing double-spending attacks. Bitcoin-NG, a protocol that has been recently proposed to improve Bitcoin’s throughput, latency and overall scalability, requires this feature. We show how covenants enable poison transactions, and detail how Bitcoin-NG can be implemented progressively as an overlay on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.
AB - This paper presents an extension to Bitcoin’s script language enabling covenants, a primitive that allows transactions to restrict how the value they transfer is used in the future. Covenants expand the set of financial instruments expressible in Bitcoin, and enable new powerful and novel use cases. We illustrate two novel security constructs built using covenants. The first, vaults, focuses on improving the security of private cryptographic keys. Historically, maintaining these keys securely and reliably has been a critical vulnerability for Bitcoin users.We show how covenants enable vaults, which disincentivize key theft by preventing an attacker from gaining full access to stolen funds. The second construct, poison transactions, is a generally useful mechanism for penalizing double-spending attacks. Bitcoin-NG, a protocol that has been recently proposed to improve Bitcoin’s throughput, latency and overall scalability, requires this feature. We show how covenants enable poison transactions, and detail how Bitcoin-NG can be implemented progressively as an overlay on top of the Bitcoin blockchain.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84988023774&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_9
DO - 10.1007/978-3-662-53357-4_9
M3 - منشور من مؤتمر
SN - 9783662533567
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 126
EP - 141
BT - Financial Cryptography and Data Security - International Workshops, FC 2016, BITCOIN, VOTING, and WAHC, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Rohloff, Kurt
A2 - Clark, Jeremy
A2 - Meiklejohn, Sarah
A2 - Wallach, Dan
A2 - Brenner, Michael
A2 - Ryan, Peter Y.A.
T2 - International Workshops on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2016 and 3rd Workshop on Bitcoin and Blockchain Research, BITCOIN 2016, 1st Workshop on Advances in Secure Electronic Voting Schemes, VOTING 2016, and 4th Workshop on Encrypted Comp...
Y2 - 26 February 2016 through 26 February 2016
ER -