What is Suter Virtual Machine (VM)?
Our ecosystem will provide a SuterVM containing several technical modules to developers who are not necessarily familiar with the underlying cryptographic technologies. Developers can use these modules to instantly launch a privacy-preserving blockchain protocol under different payment models.
Anonymous digital cryptocurrency
Our ZK-ConSNARK allows the user to develop an anonymous cryptocurrency with either a Monero-like (UTXO model), or MimbleWimble-like (no address) transaction structure, but with a much smaller constant transaction size and more efficient verification. One could also invoke our ZK-ConSNARK modules to develop a Zcash-like anonymous cryptocurrency without the need of a trusted setup.
Account-based privacy-preserving blockchains
The relatively stable privacy-preserving blockchain technique for account-based blockchains is Zether, which provides a confidential payment channel scheme while solving the interoperability issue of smart contracts. Since the main underlying cryptographic modules are Elgamal encryption and ZK-SNARK technology, our ZK-ConSNARK technology can easily applied to this case.
UTXO model-based privacy-preserving cross-chain technology
The developer can invoke our ZK-ConSNARK module to develop an improved version of anonymous multi-hop locks (AMHL), which can be applied to implement anonymous payment channels for digital assets. The existing AMHL protocol that is resistant to wormhole attacks primarily has the following two features:
- The premise of the general construction is that the underlying algebraic structure supports the construction of a homomorphic one-way function, which both of our current ZK-ConSNARK protocols can satisfy, and hence there won’t be any compatibility issue.
- However, the aforementioned general scheme only applies to blockchains with Turing-complete scripting language, such as Ethereum. We, therefore, need to further develop a scriptless AMHL module for the blockchain without comprehensive scripting language. In this case, the underlying algebraic structure is required to support the scriptless Schnorr signature or ECDSA signature scheme. Both aforementioned ZK-ConSNARK schemes satisfy this requirement.
The existing AMHL supports limited relationship anonymity, i.e., the security model only considers the sender and receiver anonymity when the adversary is the intermediate nodes of the AMHL protocol. This security model is insufficient in the sense that it ignores the possibility that the adversary might launch the attack against the anonymity of the involved parties through analyzing the payment graph of the whole blockchain. We will solve this problem by applying our ZK-ConSNARK scheme to enhance user anonymity.
