ZEXE: Enabling decentralized private computation

Abstract

Ledger-based systems that support rich applications often suffer from two limitations. First, validating a transaction requires re-executing the state transition that it attests to. Second, transactions not only reveal which application had a state transition but also reveal the application's internal state.We design, implement, and evaluate ZEXE, a ledger-based system where users can execute offline computations and subsequently produce transactions, attesting to the correctness of these computations, that satisfy two main properties. First, transactions hide all information about the offline computations. Second, transactions can be validated in constant time by anyone, regardless of the offline computation.The core of ZEXE is a construction for a new cryptographic primitive that we introduce, decentralized private computation (DPC) schemes. In order to achieve an efficient implementation of our construction, we leverage tools in the area of cryptographic proofs, including succinct zero knowledge proofs and recursive proof composition. Overall, transactions in ZEXE are 968 bytes regardless of the offline computation, and generating them takes less than 1min plus a time that grows with the offline computation.We demonstrate how to use ZEXE to realize privacy-preserving analogues of popular applications: private user-defined assets and private decentralized exchanges for these assets.