A Traceable Privacy-Preserving Transaction Protocol With Evolutionary Threshold Authentication

Decentralized payment systems, such as Bitcoin, enable immutable, and transparent payments in a distributed manner. To address the issue of user privacy leakage due to transaction transparency, some efforts have enhanced privacy protection in decentralized payment systems. However, the lack of regulatory functions in these systems allows malicious users to engage in illegal activities. To balance user privacy protection and the regulation of malicious users, some efforts have attempted to introduce decentralized agencies. However, they have not considered the issue of agency corruption. In this article, we propose a new traceable privacy-preserving transaction protocol, which tracks the addresses and transaction amounts of anonymous parties through decentralized institutions. To address the problem of committee corruption, we present a traceable privacy-preserving protocol with evolving threshold authentication based on a distributed random beacon (TPETA-to-DRB), enabling committee member updates. Furthermore, we prove that the protocol is secure under the random oracle model and conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation.