More Efficient Stealth Address Protocol
Marija Mikic, Mihajlo Srbakoski, Strahinja Praska
TL;DR
The paper addresses privacy for on-chain transactions by enhancing stealth addresses with a hybrid approach that fuses the Curvy protocol and Module-LWE techniques. It leverages Kyber-based Module-LWE to achieve substantial speedups in scanning the ephemeral public key registry while remaining Ethereum-compatible, though not fully post-quantum secure. The key contribution is the Efficient Curvy Protocol, which delivers about a threefold improvement in registry scanning compared with Curvy and approaches the performance of post-quantum MLWE SAPs without requiring a quantum-secure blockchain. This work demonstrates a practical, high-performance SAP suitable for current Ethereum ecosystems and provides open-source validation to facilitate adoption.
Abstract
The integration of privacy-preserving transactions into public blockchains such as Ethereum remains a major challenge. The Stealth Address Protocol (SAP) provides recipient anonymity by generating unlinkable stealth addresses. Existing SAPs, such as the Dual-Key Stealth Address Protocol and the Curvy Protocol, have shown significant improvements in efficiency, but remain vulnerable to quantum attacks. Post-quantum SAPs based on lattice-based cryptography, such as the Module-LWE SAP, on the other hand, offer quantum resistance while achieving better performance. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid SAP that combines the Curvy protocol with the computational advantages of the Module-LWE technique while remaining Ethereum-friendly. In contrast to full post-quantum solutions, our approach does not provide quantum security, but achieves a significant speedup in scanning the ephemeral public key registry, about three times faster than the Curvy protocol. We present a detailed cryptographic construction of our protocol and compare its performance with existing solutions. Our results prove that this hybrid approach is the most efficient Ethereum-compatible SAP to date.