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Introduction to Switch Commitments

General introduction

In cryptography a Commitment (or commitment scheme) refers to a concept which can be imagined like a box with a lock. You can put something into the box (for example a piece of a paper with a secret number written on it), lock it and give it to another person (or the public).

The other person doesn't know yet what's the secret number in the box, but if you decide to publish your secret number later in time and want to prove that this really is the secret which you came up with in the first place (and not a different one) you can prove this simply by giving the key of the box to the other person.

They can unlock the box, compare the secret within the box with the secret you just published and can be sure that you didn't change your secret since you locked it. You "committed" to the secret number beforehand, meaning you cannot change it between the time of commitment and the time of revealing.

Examples

Hash Commitment

A simple commitment scheme can be realized with a cryptographic hash function. For example: Alice and Bob want to play "Guess my number" and Alice comes up with with her really secret number 29 which Bob has to guess in the game, then before the game starts, Alice calculates:

hash( 29 + r )

and publishes the result to Bob. The r is a randomly chosen Blinding Factor which is needed because otherwise Bob could just try hashing all the possible numbers for the game and compare the hashes.

When the game is finished, Alice simply needs to publish her secret number 29 and the blinding factor r and Bob can calculate the hash himself and easily verify that Alice did not change the secret number during the game.

Pedersen Commitment

Other, more advanced commitment schemes can have additional properties. For example Mimblewimble and Confidential Transactions (CT) make heavy use of Pedersen Commitments, which are homomorphic commitments. Homomorphic in this context means that (speaking in the "box" metaphor from above) you can take two of these locked boxes (box1 and box2) and somehow "add" them together, so that you get a single box as result (which still is locked), and if you open this single box later (like in the examples before) the secret it contains, is the sum of the secrets from box1 and box2.

While this "box" metaphor no longer seems to be reasonable in the real-world this is perfectly possible using the properties of operations on elliptic curves.

Look into Introduction to Mimblewimble for further details on Pedersen Commitments and how they are used in Grin.

Properties of commitment schemes:

In general for any commitment scheme we can identify two important properties which can be weaker or stronger, depending on the type of commitment scheme:

  • Hidingness (or Confidentiality): How good is the commitment scheme protecting the secret commitment. Or speaking in terms of our example from above: what would an attacker need to open the box (and learn the secret number) without having the key to unlock it?

  • Bindingness: Is it possible at all (or how hard would it be) for an attacker to somehow find a different secret, which would produce the same commitment, so that the attacker could later open the commitment to a different secret, thus breaking the binding of the commitment.

Security of these properties:

For these two properties different security levels can be identified.

The two most important combinations of these are

  • perfectly binding and computationally hiding commitment schemes and
  • computationally binding and perfectly hiding commitment schemes

"Computationally" binding or hiding means that the property (bindingness/hidingness) is secured by the fact that the underlying mathematical problem is too hard to be solved with existing computing power in reasonable time (i.e. not breakable today as computational resources are bound in the real world).

"Perfectly" binding or hiding means that even with infinite computing power it would be impossible to break the property (bindingness/hidingness).

Mutual exclusivity:

It is important to realize that it's impossible that any commitment scheme can be perfectly binding and perfectly hiding at the same time. This can be easily shown with a thought experiment: Imagine an attacker having infinite computing power, he could simply generate a commitment for all possible values (and blinding factors) until finding a pair that outputs the same commitment. If we further assume the commitment scheme is perfectly binding (meaning there cannot be two different values leading to the same commitment) this uniquely would identify the value within the commitment, thus breaking the hidingness.

The same is true the other way around. If a commitment scheme is perfectly hiding there must exist several input values resulting in the same commitment (otherwise an attacker with infinite computing power could just try all possible values as described above). This concludes that the commitment scheme cannot be perfectly binding.

Always a compromise

The key take-away point is this: it's always a compromise, you can never have both properties (hidingness and bindingness) with perfect security. If one is perfectly secure then the other can be at most computationally secure (and the other way around).

Considerations for cryptocurrencies

Which roles do these properties play in the design of cryptocurrencies?

Hidingness: In privacy oriented cryptocurrencies like Grin, commitment schemes are used to secure the contents of transactions. The sender commits to an amount of coins he sends, but for the general public the concrete amount should remain private (protected by the hidingness property of the commitment scheme).

Bindingness: At the same time no transaction creator should ever be able to change his commitment to a different transaction amount later in time. If this would be possible, an attacker could spend more coins than previously committed to in an UTXO (unspent transaction output) and therefore inflate coins out of thin air. Even worse, as the amounts are hidden, this could go undetected.

So there is a valid interest in having both of these properties always secured and never be violated.

Even with the intent being that both of these properties will hold for the lifetime of a cryptocurrency, still a choice has to be made about which commitment scheme to use.

A hard choice?

Which one of these two properties needs to be perfectly safe and for which one it would be sufficient to be computationally safe? Or in other words: in case of a disaster, if the commitment scheme unexpectedly gets broken, which one of the two properties should be valued higher? Economical soundness (no hidden inflation possible) or ensured privacy (privacy will be preserved)?

This seems like a hard to choice to make.

If we look closer into this we realize that the commitment scheme only needs to be perfectly binding at the point in time when the scheme actually gets broken. Until then it will be safe even if it's only computationally binding.

At the same time a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency needs to ensure the hidingness property forever. Unlike the binding property, which only is important at the time when a transaction is created and will not affect past transactions, the hidingness property must be ensured at all times. Otherwise, in the unfortunate case should the commitment scheme be broken, an attacker could go back in the chain and unblind past transactions, thus break the privacy property retroactively.

Properties of Pedersen Commitments

Pedersen Commitments are computationally binding and perfectly hiding as for a given commitment to the value v: v*H + r*G there may exist a pair of different values r1 and v1 such that the sum will be the same. Even if you have infinite computing power and could try all possible values, you would not be able to tell which one is the original one (thus perfectly hiding).

Introducing Switch Commitments

So what can be done if the bindingness of the Pedersen Commitment unexpectedly gets broken?

In general a cryptocurrency confronted with a broken commitment scheme could choose to change the scheme in use, but the problem with this approach would be that it requires to create new transaction outputs using the new scheme to make funds secure again. This would require every coin holder to move his coins into new transaction outputs. If coins are not moved into new outputs, they will not profit from the security of the new commitment scheme. Also, this has to happen before the scheme gets actually broken in the wild, otherwise the existing UTXOs no longer can be assumed to contain correct values.

In this situation Switch Commitments offer a neat solution. These type of commitments allow changing the properties of the commitments just by changing the revealing / validating procedure without changing the way commitments are created. (You "switch" to a new validation scheme which is backwards compatible with commitments created long before the actual "switch").

How does this work in detail

First let's introduce a new commitment scheme: The ElGamal commitment scheme is a commitment scheme similiar to Pedersen Commitments and it's perfectly binding (but only computationally hiding as we can never have both). It looks very similar to a Pedersen Commitment, with the addition of a new element, calculated by multiplying the blinding factor r with another generator point J:

v*H + r*G ,  r*J

So if we store the additional field r*J and ignore it for now, we can treat it like Pedersen Commitments, until we decide to also validate the full ElGamal commitment at some time in future. This is exactly what was implemented in an earlier version of Grin, before mainnet was launched. In detail: the hashed value of r*J (switch_commit_hash) was added to the transaction output, but this came with the burden of increasing the size of each output by 32 bytes.

Fortunately, later on the Mimblewimble mailinglist Tim Ruffing came up with a really beautiful idea (initially suggested by Pieter Wuille), which offers the same advantages but doesn't need this extra storage of an additional element per transaction output:

The idea is the following:

A normal Pedersen commitment looks like this:

v*H + r*G

(v is value of the input/output, r is a truly random blinding factor, and H and G are two generator points on the elliptic curve).

If we adapt this by having r not being random itself, but using another random number r' and create the Pedersen Commitment:

v*H + r*G

such that:

r = r' + hash( v*H + r'*G  ,  r'*J )

(using the additional third generation point J on the curve) then r still is perfectly valid as a blinding factor, as it's still randomly distributed, but now we see that the part within the brackets of the hash function (v*H + r'*G , r'*J) is an ElGamal commitment.

This neat idea lead to the removal of the switch commitment hash from the outputs in this (and following) pull requests as now it could be easily included into the Pedersen Commitments.

This is how it is currently implemented in Grin. Pedersen commitments are used for the Confidential Transaction but instead of choosing the blinding factor r only by random, it is calculated by adding the hash of an ElGamal commitment to a random r' (see here in main_impl.h#L267).

In general switch commitments were first described in the paper "Switch Commitments: A Safety Switch for Confidential Transactions"). The "switch" in the name comes from the fact that you can virtually flip a "switch" in the future and simply by changing the validation procedure you can change the strength of the bindingness and hidingness property of your commitments and this even works in a backwards compatible way with commitments created today.

Conclusion

Grin uses Pedersen Commitments - like other privacy cryptocurrencies do as well - with the only difference that the random blinding factor r is created using the ElGamal commitment scheme.

This might not seem like a big change on a first look, but it provides an important safety measure:

Pedersen Commitments are already perfectly hiding so whatever happens, privacy will never be at risk without requiring any action from users. But in case of a disaster if the bindingness of the commitment scheme gets broken, then switch commitments can be enabled (via a soft fork) requiring that all new transactions prove that their commitment is not breaking the bindingness by validating the full ElGamal commitment.

But in this case users would still have a choice:

  • they can decide to continue to create new transactions, even if this might compromise their privacy (only on their last UTXOs) as the ElGamal commitment scheme is only computationally hiding, but at least they would still have access to their coins

  • or users can decide to just leave the money alone, walk away and make no more transactions (but preserve their privacy, as their old transactions only validated the Pedersen commitment which is perfectly hiding)

There are many cases where a privacy leak is much more dangerous to one's life than some cryptocurrency might be worth. But this is a decision that should be left up to the individual user and switch commitments enable this type of choice.

It should be made clear that this is a safety measure meant to be enabled in case of a disaster. If advances in computing would put the hardness of the discrete log problem in question, a lot of other cryptographic systems, including other cryptocurrencies, will be in urgent need of updating their primitives to a future-proof system. The switch commitments just provide an additional layer of security if the bindingness of Pedersen commitments ever breaks unexpectedly.