Towards a more confidential Ethereum network – Since its launch in 2015, Ethereum (ETH) is a breeding ground for innovation. Nevertheless, the network still faces many challenges. The privacy and the scalability are among the main challenges for the years to come.
Vitalik Buterin wants a network with more privacy
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, is actively involved in its evolution. Thus, the latter frequently publishes the results of research on his personal blog.
In his latest post, Vitalik Buterin emphasizes confidentiality and privacy. Indeed, his paper begins in the heart of the matter by stating:
“One of the biggest remaining challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem is that of privacy. »
Indeed, the use of Ethereum leads to an indelible mark of your actions on the blockchain. Marks that are until now public. Thus, as explained by Buterin, confidentiality is already at the heart of developer debates. However, these debates have mainly focused on one aspect of confidentiality, that during transfers in ETH or ERC-20.
Nevertheless, in his publication, Vitalik Buterin wishes to highlight another type of tool that helps to ensure confidentiality: them stealth addresses.
In practice, these stealth addresses or stealth addresses, allow a user to receive funds without disclosing their primary address.
Originally, the idea of stealth addresses amounts to Peter Toddwhich had introduced the concept in the context of Bitcoin.
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In fact, the stealth addresses offer the same characteristics as the generation of a new address at each transfer. Thus, they make it possible to fight against the reuse of addresses while offering increased confidentiality.
Under the hood, the stealth addresses operate as follows. During a transfer from Alice to Bob, Bob will generate, but keep secret, an expense address. It then uses this key to generate a “meta-stealth address”. That meta-stealth address will be sent to Alice to complete the transfer.
For her part, Alice will use this address to generate a stealth address which only Bob can access. When transferring funds to this address, Alice also posts a cryptographic proof ephemeral which allows Bob to discover the stealth address used.
According to Vitalik Buterin, this type of address could be implemented relatively quickly and “would be a significant privacy boost for Ethereum users”. However, most of the work will be on the side of the wallets, which will have to generate this new type of address.
This idea comes at just the right time. In effect, Tornado Cash, one of the main sources of anonymity on Ethereum, is being actively attacked. The protocol and its developers are held responsible for the uses that may have been made of their tool.
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