Multi-hop anonymous payment channel network based on onion routing

Payment channel networks (PCNs) are one of the most promising off-chain solutions to the blockchain scalability problem. However, most current payment channel schemes suffer from overly ideal routing assumptions or fail to provide complete path privacy protection. To address the above problems, the multi-hop anonymous and privacy-preserving PCN scheme are analyzed and a multi-hop anonymous PCN based on onion routing is proposed based on it. The scheme removes the routing assumptions of the original scheme, designs an onion routing-based payment channel network, and modifies the way relay nodes construct elliptic curve discrete logarithmic problems to resist wormhole attacks. Finally, the security analysis shows that the scheme in this paper has atomicity, relational anonymity and resistance to wormhole attacks. The latest bilinear pairing anonymous multi-hop payment (EAMHL+) scheme is used to compare communication and computing overhead. The results show that the scheme in this paper requires less communication overhead and is more efficient in terms of computational overhead when the average hop number of the payment channel network is 3 hops and the network diameter is 6 hops. © 2024 The Authors. IET Blockchain published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology.