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LNPBP: 0003
Vertical: Bitcoin protocol
Title: Deterministic definition of transaction output containing cryptographic
       commitment
Authors: Giacomo Zucco,
         Dr Maxim Orlovsky <[email protected]>,
         Federico Tenga,
         Martino Salvetti
Comments-URI: https://github.com/LNP-BP/lnpbps/issues/5
Status: Proposal
Type: Standards Track
Created: 2019-10-27
License: CC0-1.0

Abstract

The standard defines an algorithm for deterministic definition of the transaction output containing cryptographic commitments made under the standards LNPBP-1 [1] and LNPBP-2 [2].

Background

Embedding cryptographic commitments into Bitcoin blockchain has become a common practice [3]. Bitcoin blockchain provides strong guarantees on the underlying data immutability, presenting a reliable, distributed and censorship-resitent proof-of-publication [4] medium. While existing standards defines how the cryptographic commitments can be used with public keys on SECP256k1 elliptic curve (used by Bitcoin) and embedded within transaction outputs, it still has to be defined how the interested parties may detect which of a Bitcoin transaction output contains the commitment, created under some specific protocol, including those interoperable with LNPBP-1 and LNPBP-2 standards.

Motivation

A number of use cases for cryptographic commitments (CC) require some commitment to be unique. For instance, single-use seals [5] may utilize them to achieve it's one-time commitment properties, as may be required in some of the applications [6], [7]. While the deterministic way for embedding into Bitcoin transactions (like "always use the first output) may be defined on a per-protocol basis, it seems that some best-practices, defining the best privacy-preserving and secure algorithm for such deterministic commitments in Bitcoin transactions may also be useful for the industry.

Some of the protocols relies on the first OP_RETURN output present in the transaction to contain the commitment [3]. However, this would not work for commitments supporting other output types ([2], [8]), and for may introduce collisions with other protocols using OP_RETURN, like OMNI Layer [9].

Static definition of the output containing the commitment will be incompatible with BIP-69 [10], defining deterministic transaction output ordering and will not work with current Lightning Network implementation following the same rules [11].

Specification

Cryptographic commitments under this standard are made according to LNPBP-1 [1] and LNPBP-2 [2] standards.

To deterministically define the number of transaction output that contains CC under some protocol P, the committing party "Alice" A (which may be represented by a single person or some m-of-n federation) and the verifying party "Bob" B (which may be represented by a single person or some m-of-n federation) need to agree on three parameters:

  1. A protocol-defined parameter s, acting as a seed for all protocol-wide commitments, this must be a 8-bit value;
  2. A commitment-specific parameter c, which should not be directly reflected in the transaction, containing the given CC. This parameter under some circumstances (agreed by the parties beforehand) may be absent. The value of c must be a 8-bit value.

These two parameters serve as a "salt" for the deterministic procedure, preventing third-parties from guessing the information of the actual commitment, thus avoiding possible censorship by the miners and on-chain based transaction analysis.

Alice, creating the transaction containing CC, and Bob, verifying it, must use the following procedure:

  1. Compute the transaction fee f, as a difference between total transaction output amounts in satoshis and total inputs amounts, in satoshis:
    f = sum(outputs) - sum(inputs).
    This can be done, for instance, by utilizing data from a partially-singed bitcoin transaction, or by contacting Electrum Server or Bitcoin Core backend. It should be noted, that according to Bitcoin consensus rules, this amount must always be positive and greater than zero(f > 0); otherwise it is not a valid Bitcoin transaction and the protocol must fail.
  2. Compute the adjusted fee a as a 32-bit modulo of the potentially-64 bit number f:
    a = f mod 2^32.
  3. Add to this number a previously-agreed values of s and c (if c was not defined, use 0 for c value by default). This will give a commitment-factor x:
    x = a + s + c.
    Since s and c is a 8-bit numbers and a is a 32-bit number, the result will fit a 64-bit number without overflow.
  4. Get the number of outputs n for the transaction containing the output with the given cryptographic commitment.
  5. Compute d as d = x mod n. The d will represent an index of the output which must contain a cryptographic commitment. All other transaction outputs will not be a valid outputs for a contain cryptographic commitment under the used protocol.

Compatibility

The proposed standard is incompatible with many of existing practices for definition of the transaction output containing cryptographic commitment, including OpenTimestamps, which uses first transaction output for storing the commitment [1]

Nevertheless, use of protocol-specific pre-defined salt may be utilised as a flag signalling the support of the current standard, which will help to avoid possible commitment collisions across different protocols.

Future SIGHASH_NOINPUT standard BIP-118 [12] may be compatible with this proposal, since a protocol utilizing the present standard may define that any transaction commitment with an input signature flag set to SIGHASH_NOINPUT must default to the zero value of commitment-specific parameter c. This will still preserve the privacy from the onchain analysis tools due to the presence of the protocol-specific parameter s, which will be unknown for any party that does know which protocol is used by some transaction (given the fact that the used protocol can't be guessed from the transaction itself).

Rationale

The rationale for the technical decisions is provided within the specification text.

Reference implementation

https://github.com/BP-WG/bp-core/blob/master/dbc/src

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank Giacomo Zucco and Alekos Filini for their initial work on the commitment schemes as a part of early RGB effort [7].

References

  1. Maxim Orlovsky, et al. Key tweaking: collision-resistant elliptic curve-based commitments (LNPBP-1 Standard). https://github.com/LNP-BP/lnpbps/blob/master/lnpbp-0001.md
  2. Maxim Orlovsky, et al. Deterministic embedding of elliptic curve-based commitments into transaction output scriptPubkey (LNPBP-2 standard). https://github.com/LNP-BP/lnpbps/blob/master/lnpbp-0002.md
  3. Peter Todd. OpenTimestamps: Scalable, Trust-Minimized, Distributed Timestamping with Bitcoin. https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement
  4. Peter Todd. Setting the record straight on Proof-of-Publication. https://petertodd.org/2014/setting-the-record-proof-of-publication
  5. Peter Todd. Preventing Consensus Fraud with Commitments and Single-Use-Seals. https://petertodd.org/2016/commitments-and-single-use-seals
  6. Peter Todd. Scalable Semi-Trustless Asset Transfer via Single-Use-Seals and Proof-of-Publication. https://petertodd.org/2017/scalable-single-use-seal-asset-transfer
  7. OpenSeals Framework https://github.com/rgb-org/spec/blob/v1.0/01-OpenSeals.md
  8. Omni Protocol Specification (formerly Mastercoin). https://github.com/OmniLayer/spec
  9. RGB Protocol Specification, version 0.4. https://github.com/rgb-org/spec/blob/old-master/01-rgb.md
  10. Lexicographical Indexing of Transaction Inputs and Outputs (BIP-69 standard). https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0069.mediawiki
  11. Lightning Network BOLT-3 standard. https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/v1.0/03-transactions.md
  12. Christian Decker. SIGHASH_NOINPUT. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0118.mediawiki

License

This document is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license.

Test vectors

TBD