More Examples
“A ring signature requires several different public keys for verification.”
“Monero is perhaps the most well-known cryptocurrency to use ring signatures.”
“The Cryptonote application layer protocol uses traceable ring signatures.”
Definition(s) from the Web
- Ring signature is a more sophisticated scheme that demand several different public keys for verification. In this case the transaction is signed by a group of users. Thus, the verifier may only identify that one of them was a signer, but not who exactly that was. Though this does not offer provable anonymity, the increase in privacy in comparison to Bitcoin is considerable. CryptoNote automatically creates multiple unique one-time addresses for each of the payments, which are created from the single public key. Even though the payment is sent to a public address, in the block chain it appears as if it is sent to a one-time address. The sender uses random data and the public address of the receiver to calculate this one-time key of the payment. The redemption of the funds requires the receiver’s private key, so only the latter may receive the money sent to the one-time address. Moreover, no third party can discover the link between the one-time key and the receiver’s public address. Source
- The main difference between the two technologies is that Bitcoin (and most digital currencies) is less opaque than CryptoNote-based currencies due to the latter’s blockchain being almost anonymous, contrary to non-Cryptonote blockchains. CryptoNote currencies use a distributed public ledger that records all balances and transactions of its in-built currency like Bitcoin. Unlike Bitcoin, CryptoNote’s transactions cannot be followed through the blockchain in a way that reveals who sent or received coins. The approximate amount of a transaction can be known, but the origin, destination, or actual amount cannot be learned. The only information available is that the actual amount was lower than the displayed amount. The only people with access to the whole set of data about a transaction are the sender or receiver of the transaction and the person who possesses one or both secret keys. Another significant difference is CryptoNote’s hash-based proof-of-work algorithm. Bitcoin uses SHA-256, which is a CPU-bound function. That means that participants (miners) are only limited by their calculation speeds, and it is relatively cheap to create an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) device, which will surpass an ordinary computer in hashes per unit of money. CryptoNote uses memory bound function CryptoNight, which cannot be easily pipelined. CryptoNote codebase is not |forked from Bitcoin’s, so it also has other different inner algorithms, for things such as recalculating new difficulty level or new block size. Source
- In cryptography, a ring signature is a type of digital signature that can be performed by any member of a set of users that each have keys. Therefore, a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular set of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the set’s members’ keys was used to produce the signature. Ring signatures are similar to group signatures but differ in two key ways: first, there is no way to revoke the anonymity of an individual signature, and second, any set of users can be used as a signing set without additional setup. Source
