LiteZKP: Lightening Zero-Knowledge Proof-Based Blockchains for IoT and Edge Platforms

Abstract

This article presents LiteZKP a framework for supporting multiple anonymous payments using a smart contract-based zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) protocol on resource-limited devices. Specifically, to address challenges related to minimizing the computational overhead and offer a fully anonymous system, LiteZKP includes novel schemes such a new merkle tree mechanism to reduce the burden of ZKP operations, and integrates smart contract-based ZKP with an off-chain payment channel to reduce the amount of ZKP operations when performing continuous data exchange. We present evaluation results of LiteZKP from both PC-scale and resource-limited client devices and our results suggest that LiteZKP reduces the latency and energy consumption by more than 55% on Internet of Things (IoT)/mobile edge computing platforms, while requiring only 8% of block processing fee compared to a naive ZKP-based scheme.