A commitment and ring signature based scheme for amount and identity privacy protection in blockchain

Blockchain has been envisioned as an anonymous cryptocurrency framework and can be applied in various applications such as e-payment, share economics, and distributed ledger. Although an account is anonymous, privacy in terms of consumption behaviors still imposes leakage risks. For example, an adversary may infer the consumption capability related to an account further by analyzing the history of consumption records. It is thus of critical importance to design a solution to preserve the anonymity of both transaction amount and transaction peer’s identity, which is changeable because the amount must be still authenticated in anonymity. In this paper, we propose a scheme by using Pedersen commitment to anonymize the transaction amount, and together using ring signature to conceal the transaction peer’s identity while maintaining authentication. Especially, we further improve the security of anonymous authentication enabled by ring signature by introducing accountability, which can defend against double-spending attacks by penalization and empower auditability. The extensive performance and security analysis justify the applicability of the proposed scheme.