Payment protocols developed to realize off-chain transactions in Payment
channel network (PCN) assumes the underlying routing algorithm transfers the
payment via a single path. However, a path may not have sufficient capacity to
route a transaction. It is inevitable to split the payment across multiple
paths. If we run independent instances of the protocol on each path, the
execution may fail in some of the paths, leading to partial transfer of funds.
A payer has to reattempt the entire process for the residual amount. We propose
a secure and privacy-preserving payment protocol, CryptoMaze. Instead of
independent paths, the funds are transferred from sender to receiver across
several payment channels responsible for routing, in a breadth-first fashion.
Payments are resolved faster at reduced setup cost, compared to existing
state-of-the-art. Correlation among the partial payments is captured,
guaranteeing atomicity. Further, two party ECDSA signature is used for
establishing scriptless locks among parties involved in the payment. It reduces
space overhead by leveraging on core Bitcoin scripts. We provide a formal model
in the Universal Composability framework and state the privacy goals achieved
by CryptoMaze. We compare the performance of our protocol with the existing
single path based payment protocol, Multi-hop HTLC, applied iteratively on one
path at a time on several instances. It is observed that CryptoMaze requires
less communication overhead and low execution time, demonstrating efficiency
and scalability.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl
