Bitmessage Plus: A Blockchain-Based Communication Protocol With High Practicality

Abstract

We are in the Internet era, when protecting the security of personal information is both vital and challenging. As the most commonly used methods of communication, centralized systems cannot meet the increasing need for information security. Blockchain, with its characteristics of openness, decentralization, and tamper resistance, is an innovative technology underlying Bitcoin. There is potential to use blockchain in developing decentralized and transparent communication systems. Bitmessage is a well-known decentralized messaging system that enables users to exchange messages and prevents accidental eavesdropping. Bitmessage achieves anonymity and privacy by relying on the blockchain flooding propagation mechanism and asymmetric encryption algorithm. Unfortunately, Bitmessage uses proof-ofwork as the solution to prevent spam, which wastes computational power and makes it inefficient to be used in practice. To address this problem, we improve Bitmessage with a novel antispam mechanism based on proof-of-space, which requires the user to dedicate a certain amount of disk space to send a message. This improvement reduces the time and computing resource costs by eliminating computationally heavy hash operations. Moreover, we achieve a high level of anonymity by using the stealth address as the destination of the delivered message, which can only be identified by the intended receiver. Finally, we improve the protocol's reliability by taking the blockchain as an immutable database to store the delivered messages.INDEX TERMS decentralized communication system, blockchain, proof of space, stealth address, security analysis LIUCHENG SHI received the B.S. degree in information and computing sciences from Peking University, China, in 2012. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics with Peking University. His current research interests include blockchain technology and public key cryptography and applied cryptography.[26] ZHAOZHONG GUO received the B.S. degree in information and computing sciences from Peking University, China, in 2012. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics with Peking University. His current research interests include blockchain technology and public key cryptography and multiparty computation.

A Comprehensive Review of Blockchain Technology-Enabled Smart Manufacturing: A Framework, Challenges and Future Research Directions

“…The encryption process is illustrated in Figure 2 . At present, common asymmetric encryption algorithms are hash function, RSA, Elgamal, D-H and elliptic curve encryption algorithm (ECC) [ 37 ]. Blockchain technology mainly utilizes ECC, which has high security performance and low complexity.…”