Stealth Address and Key Management Techniques in Blockchain Systems

Nicolas T. Courtois, Rebekah Mercer

2017

Abstract

Bitcoin is an open source payment system with a market capitalization of about 15 G$. During the years several key management solutions have been proposed to enhance bitcoin. The common characteristic of these techniques is that they allow to derive public keys independently of the private keys, and that these keys match. In this paper we overview the historical development of such techniques, specify and compare all major variants proposed or used in practical systems. We show that such techniques can be designed based on 2 distinct ECC arithmetic properties and how to combine both. A major trend in blockchain systems is to use by Stealth Address (SA) techniques to make different payments made to the same payee unlikable. We review all known SA techniques and show that early variants are less secure. Finally we propose a new SA method which is more robust against leakage and against various attacks.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Courtois N. and Mercer R. (2017). Stealth Address and Key Management Techniques in Blockchain Systems . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP, ISBN 978-989-758-209-7, pages 559-566. DOI: 10.5220/0006270005590566

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp17,
author={Nicolas T. Courtois and Rebekah Mercer},
title={Stealth Address and Key Management Techniques in Blockchain Systems},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,},
year={2017},
pages={559-566},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006270005590566},
isbn={978-989-758-209-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,
TI - Stealth Address and Key Management Techniques in Blockchain Systems
SN - 978-989-758-209-7
AU - Courtois N.
AU - Mercer R.
PY - 2017
SP - 559
EP - 566
DO - 10.5220/0006270005590566