Abstract
IOTA, one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world, is a platform that links together Internet of Things (IoT) devices and is specifically built for fee-free machine-to-machine micropayments and messaging. One of IOTA’s core features is the Tangle - which is a new distributed ledger concept that tracks all payments and interactions. Despite its new features, there are some potential privacy issues associated when users combine the ubiquity and integration of the IoT and machine-to-machine transactions in our foreseeable future. In this paper, we describe an implementation that Bulletproof technique [9] with the IOTA platform to allow the hiding of transaction values and user balances.
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Notes
- 1.
It is yet to be seen whether this claim is true in the long run, but there is evidence that it is not true is all cases, which will be covered in the background section.
- 2.
As we were working in Go, we have modified a Go implementation of the Bulletproofs paper - there are a few slight differences to the generator than in the reference implementation- https://github.com/wrv/bp-go.
- 3.
It is worth noting that anything negative about IOTA on the web quickly attacks many critics; so the veracity of the claims in the article are also open to discussion.
- 4.
David Sønstebø explaining the choice to use Ternary - https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/6jgbvb/iota_isnt_it_the_perfect_cryptocurrency/dje8os2/?st=jgkpv09k&sh=05179241.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
In the cryptocurrency space that we are examining, this would allow the party hiding the value to double-spend their coins, thus creating new coins that should not exist.
- 8.
For a complete breakdown of the algorithms used to determine these criteria, see Sect. A.1 in [4].
- 9.
To see a detailed example of the formula for the Proof of knowledge, see Sect. A.2 in [4].
- 10.
For the zero knowledge formula, see Sect. A.3 in [4].
- 11.
The different ways to create a Bitcoin wallet can be found on their official documentation - https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-guide#wallets.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61702342), the Science and Technology Innovation Projects of Shenzhen (GJHZ 20160226202520268, JCYJ 20170302151321095, JCYJ 20170302145623566) and Tencent “Rhinoceros Birds” - Scientific Research Foundation for Young Teachers of Shenzhen University.
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Ince, P., Liu, J.K., Zhang, P. (2018). Adding Confidential Transactions to Cryptocurrency IOTA with Bulletproofs. In: Au, M., et al. Network and System Security. NSS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11058. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02744-5_3
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