Subject: Private Key Handover
Introduction
There are protocols where, at the end of the protocol, semantically, some lump fund which was previously shared by two or more participants, is now owned by only one of the participants.
For example, an onchain HTLC starts with two participants: the offeror and the acceptor. Assuming the “happy path” where the preimage is learned by the offeror, at the end of the protocol, the offeror semantically releases its claim on the HTLC funds and the fund (should) now be singularly controlled by the acceptor.
When implementing such a protocol onchain, on a blockchain that supports Taproot, a possible optimization is for the protocol to always require ephemeral public keys in the keyspend path, and for participant(s) that want to release their claim on the fund to simply hand over the ephemeral private key to the final single beneficiary, which would allow the beneficiary party to use the keyspend path to claim the funds without further participation of any other party.
In our HTLC motivating example, the keyspend path of the HTLC would be the MuSig2 of the ephemeral keys of the offeror and acceptor, and in the happy path, the acceptor gives the offeror the preimage directly (instead of onchain) and the offeror then hands over the ephemeral private key. The acceptor, now in possession of both halves of the ephemeral private key of the keyspend path, can now use the keyspend path unilaterally.
Benefits And Limitations
To be very clear, in a world where MuSig2 exists and is implemented, the advantage is:
- The beneficiary party can RBF the transaction to claim the lump fund,
even if the protocol has no support for RBF.
- In particular, the transaction to claim the lump fund does not need to have anchor outputs (which require extra blockspace weight) in order to freely (CPFP-)RBF after the termination of the protocol.
- This can simplify the design of the protocol, while allowing for high-quality implementations to RBF the transaction that claims the fund (simple proof-of-concept implementations need not implement RBF, and are simplified by the absence of RBF support in the protocol; the RBF support can be added later without changing the protocol or requiring that the simple initial implementation has RBF support).
- Without private key handover, we can still use MuSig2 to save
blockspace, but must select one of these options:
- Not have RBF, so you run the risk of sudden fee spikes after completing the MuSig2, possibly allowing timeout branches to become valid and risking funds loss.
- Support RBF in the protocol, so that all participants (not just the beneficiary) need to stay online until the fund spend is deeply confirmed onchain, with additional protocol messages and state-tracking of multiple possible RBF candidates, needing to be implemented by all participants.
- Support RBF-CPFP by adding an anchor output to the transaction signed using MuSig2 in the protocol, which increases your block space usage by that anchor output if RBF turns out to be unnecessary. This also requires exogenous fees and additional blockspace usage if RBF does turn out to be necessary.
- The beneficiary party can batch the transaction that claims the
lump fund with any other operations.
- The “other operations” here can be completely different protocols that do not themselves have any additional support for private key handover!
We should note the limitation as well:
- The fund must be a lump fund, i.e. a single UTXO onchain, and the
fund must be transferred as a whole, at the end of the protocol, to
unilateral control of some single beneficiary party.
- In particular, this cannot be used to remove RBF support in the Lightning splicing protocol, as after the end of the protocol, the fund in the protocol — the channel output — must still be in bilateral control of both parties.
- In particular, this cannot be used to create RBF support in the Lightning cooperative close protocol, as after the end of the cooperative close, the likelihood is very high that the single fund — the channel output — must be split into two unilaterally-controlled funds; this optimization can only work on single funds.
Private Key Handover
The “private key handover” is a building block for Bitcoin protocols:
- At the start of the protocol, each participant provides two public
keys:
- An ephemeral public key.
- This should be a fresh keypair from entropy.
- If using a keypair derived from some master private key, should use the equivalent of hardened derivation (e.g. derive using HMAC, where the key is the master private key, and the message is some nonce tweak).
- Participants do not need to store the corresponding private key in persistent storage, and it would probably be undesirable to store it (or its derivation path) in persistent storage.
- A permanent public key.
- This should be recoverable across restarts of the software.
- An ephemeral public key.
- The keyspend branch of the Taproot output is computed as the
MuSig2 of the ephemeral public keys of all participants.
- The participants MUST store the MuSig2 sum of the public keys in persistent storage.
- Public keys are public and exfiltration of the public keys only reduces privacy, but does not lead to loss of funds.
- Individual leaves of the Taproot output use the permanent public keys as appropriate.
- At the end of the protocol where a single beneficiary party is
selected, the other participants send the ephemeral private key
to the beneficiary.
- In case one or more of the other participants do not cooperate by giving their ephemeral private key, the single beneficiary can use the appropriate Taproot leaf.
- On receiving all the ephemeral private keys of the other parties, the beneficiary party can then repeat the MuSig2 calculation using the private keys, to generate the combined private key.
For an HTLC protocol to be used as a building block for a swap protocol:
- When setting up the HTLC, the HTLC offeror and HTLC acceptor
exchange their public keys:
- Offeror ephemeral public key.
- Offeror permanent public key.
- Acceptor ephemeral public key.
- Acceptor permanent public key.
- The HTLC Taproot output would have a keyspend branch that
is composed of the MuSig2 of the offeror ephemeral
public key and the acceptor ephemeral public key.
- The participants MUST store the MuSig2 sum of the public keys in persistent storage.
- The HTLC Tapleaves would then be:
- Timeout branch: Signature from offeror permanent
public key after a
CLTVorCSVtimeout. - Preimage branch: Signature from acceptor permanent public key, and a preimage of a given hash.
- Timeout branch: Signature from offeror permanent
public key after a
- At the end of the overall swap protocol, the acceptor then provides the preimage to the offeror. In response, the offeror hands over the offeror ephemeral private key.
- On receiving the offeror ephemeral private key, the acceptor
derives the combined private key for the MuSig2 sum of the
ephemeral public keys.
The acceptor then checks that the resulting sum private key
matches the stored sum public key, and if so, can then spend
the fund unilaterally.
- As mentioned, this allows the acceptor to RBF any spends of the HTLC output without the protocol having to add special messages for RBF, and without requiring CPFP-RBF support via an anchor output.
The following fallback cases need to be handled:
- In case the offeror does not hand over the offeror ephemeral
private key after a few seconds, or the offeror sends an private
key that causes the resulting combined private key to not match,
the acceptor can fall back by spending using the Tapleaf branch
where it has to sign and show the preimage of the hash.
- This requires that the acceptor know the public key of the keyspend path.
- The acceptor can recover this public key as long as it can recover the MuSig2 sum of the ephemeral public keys.
- In case the acceptor software is restarted after it has sent the
preimage, but before it can receive the offeror ephemeral
private key, the acceptor can fall back by spending the Tapleaf
branch where it ahs to sign and show the preimage of the hash.
- The recommendation is to only store the ephemeral private keys in memory, so if the acceptor software is stopped and restarted, the acceptor ephemeral private key is lost and it cannot calculate the sum of the ephemeral private keys.
- Thus, the requirement that the participants MUST store the MuSig2 sum of the ephemeral public keys, which lets the participants spend the funds using the Tapleaf branch by showing the keyspend branch public key and the Merkle tree proof of the corresponding Tapleaf.
Of note is that, as the keys in the keyspend are ephemeral, and by “ephemeral” we mean “will only be used for this run of the protocol”, this gets forward security once the spend of the fund is deeply confirmed.
Graceful Implementation
Initial implementations of a protocol that uses private key handover need not immediately support RBF or batching.
Thus, initial implementations of the protocol can be simple, naive implementations that just spend the lump sum output to an address with unilateral control of the beneficiary, in a simple one-input-one-output unbatched transaction with a feerate slightly higher than prevailing feerates.
The ability to add RBF or batching can be added later once the implementors have enough confidence in their work for the simple use-case, to pursue more ambitious sophistication.
Importantly, implementations with RBF and/or batching support can talk seamlessly with simpler implementations without that support; the protocol remains the same, but there is no need for the simple implementation to be aware of additional messages or anything needed by the sophisticated implementation.
This allows for “graceful implementation” where you can start with a simple implementation and add features, without breaking protocol compatibility, and also start off with a simpler protocol that will work at both the “proof-of-concept” scale to “mass adoption champagne problems” scale.
Particularly sophisticated implementations can even batch the spending of the lump sum with completely unrelated, other protocols, which themselves may or may not use private key handover, saving even more blockspace.
Compare this to the complexity of Lightning Network splicing. Even initial implementations that have no intention of supporting RBF or batching, must be at least aware of the messages that are needed if the counterparty has to RBF or batch. Indeed, initial implementation are forced to implement RBF, as multiple versions of the splice transaction need to be signed in parallel until one of the versions is deeply confirmed (so you might as well just go whole hog and be able to propose the RBF yourelf, since you need to keep track of multiple exclusive transaction versions either way).
Encrypted Handover
We should be cautious about sending private keys across the network.
Of course, one layer of protection is to use BOLT8, or the less advanced protocol TLS, to send messages containing the private key. This provides end-to-end encryption and message integrity.
However, this is only one layer of protection. In particular, the encryption and integrity ends at the point in the software where the BOLT8 decryption and integrity validation is done.
Modern software can be very complex and may send various information to various sub-components. Plaintexts of the messages after the end-to-end encrypted integrity tunnel would be sent around and possibly have multiple copies in transit from one part of the software to the part which actually implements the protocol that uses private key handover. Additional copies of private keys would be problematic as it increases the surface area for private key exfiltration.
As a concrete example, the C-Lightning (also known as CLN or Core Lightning) implementation will send out plaintexts of odd-numbered messages, via pipes, to any plugins that register for notification of odd-numbered messages. Partial security breaches may allow hackers to get at in-pipe data, and various ways of running CLN plugins remotely may allow the odd-numbered messages to be sent via JSON-RPC notifications, in plaintext, over the network.
To reduce this attack surface, our protocol can send over the encryption of the ephemeral private key, as follows:
- Suppose that participant Alice (HTLC-offeror in the HTLC use-case) wants to hand over their ephemeral private key to participant Bob (HTLC-acceptor in the HTLC use-case).
- Alice takes the ECDH of the Alice ephemeral private key and
the Bob ephemeral public key:
- Multiply Alice ephemeral private key (scalar) by Bob ephemeral public key (point), resulting in a point.
- Format the point into the 33-byte DER format.
- Take the SHA256 hash of the above 33-byte DER format, resulting in 32-byte hash.
- Alice XORs the 32-byte ECDH output with the Alice ephemeral
private key.
- This is best done using an in-place XOR where the result overwrites the plaintext Alice ephemeral private key, to further reduce the time the plaintext copy is available in-memory.
- After this step, Alice can safely free the memory for reuse in insecure code.
- Alice sends the XORed result to Bob (preferably in an encrypted integrity tunnel, such as BOLT8).
- Bob receives the XORed encrypted result.
- Bob takes the ECDH of the Bob ephemeral private key and the
Alice ephemeral public key.
- This should give the same mask as above.
- Bob XORs the 32-byte ECDH output with the encrypted private
key from Alice.
- This results in the original Alice private key.
This scheme reduces the scope of where the plaintext private key is available, providing extra layers of protection in contexts where it would be desirable.
(The proposed scheme is only safe under the random oracle model.)
While many implementations would not need to have the protection against internal breaches of data, putting it as part of the protocol allows the rare implementation that does need it to be safer.
The encryption sub-protocol requires primitives (SECP256K1 scalar by point multiplication, 33-byte DER formatting, SHA256) that are likely to be commonly needed in Bitcoin software anyway, so the additional implementation complexity of using encrypted private key handover is expected to be low.
Non-HTLC Examples
Private key handover is a generic building block for protocols. It can be used beyond HTLCs.
For example, in the theoretical SuperScalar design, a client may cooperatively exit from the LSP, by offering the entire amount inside the SuperScalar for some equivalent onchain amount. The client can use private key handover for the keys it used inside the SuperScalar in the cooperative exit protocol; once the server has given an onchain contract that the client can use to atomically swap its in-SuperScalar funds for the onchain funds.
In particular, with possession of the client key after the client has exited, the LSP can now arbitrarily reallocate liqudiity towards other clients that happen to share part of the SuperScalar tree with the client that exited, giving the LSP extra flexibility in its liquidity management.
The only requirement is that the client use some kind of hardened derivation for the in-SuperScalar keys; because the keys are handed over on exit, the client must ensure that the handed-over private key cannot be used to derive their master private key. Obviously, as the private key would need to be used across client restarts, the client would need to store the derivation path for the in-SuperScalar key(s) in persistent storage.
Even outside of SuperScalar, a bespoke LSP-client protocol can allow for a form of cooperative exit where the LSP can sign the channel output fund unilaterally, in exchange for the equivalent amount of client funds in an onchain TXO. This allows the LSP to batch multiple cooperative exits:
- The client that wants to exit offers the entire funds of
the channel with the LSP, swapping it for onchain funds
from the LSP.
- The LSP can batch the onchain funds it offers into the swap with other operations.
- After the swap, the client hands over their private key to the channel. The LSP can now unilaterally sign for that channel, and can batch the spend of the channel to recover its funds with other operations.
If the LSP has enough onchain churn (e.g. if it is also operating other onchain businesses, such as a Lightning-onchain swap service, or operating as an exchange at enough scale to use onchain operations), the ability to freely batch the above operations with others can provide actual blockspace savings.
Again, the only requirement is that the client use some kind of hardened derivation for the channel signing keys.
Non-Taproot Usage
Of note is that while true MuSig2 signing, where there is no private key handover, is only possible with Schnorr signatures, if private key handover is done, you can use a MuSig2 sum of public keys with ECDSA.
After private key handover, the beneficiary can compute the corresponding private key of the MuSig2 sum. Thu, even if ECDSA is not linear, the beneficiary can still compute the equivalent private key anyway.
The major drawback for ECDSA usage is that there is no ECDSA address that also has Taproot. Thus, you would need to expose an additional public key in the single SCRIPT, which may very well cancel out any blockspace savings. Nevertheless, it is still quite possible to use private key handover for additional flexibility and the ability to RBF and batch arbitrarily, even without blockspace savings.
(It should be noted that the last example in the previous section — bespoke LSP-client cooperative exit protocol where the LSP gets the flexibility to batch with other operations — would, today, be using ECDSA.)