How to deal with malleability of BitCoin transactions
Abstract
BitCoin transactions are malleable in a sense that given a transaction an adversary can easily construct an equivalent transaction which has a different hash. This can pose a serious problem in some BitCoin distributed contracts in which changing a transaction's hash may result in the protocol disruption and a financial loss. The problem mostly concerns protocols, which use a "refund" transaction to withdraw a deposit in a case of the protocol interruption. In this short note, we show a general technique for creating malleability-resilient "refund" transactions, which does not require any modification of the BitCoin protocol. Applying our technique to our previous paper "Fair Two-Party Computations via the BitCoin Deposits" (Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2013) allows to achieve fairness in any Two-Party Computation using the BitCoin protocol in its current version.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1312.3230,
title = {How to deal with malleability of BitCoin transactions},
author = {Marcin Andrychowicz and Stefan Dziembowski and Daniel Malinowski and Łukasz Mazurek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.3230},
year = {2013}
}