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SecurePay: Enabling Secure and Fast Payment Processing for Platform Economy

Junru Lin, Mingzhe Liu, Songze Li, Xuechao Wang

TL;DR

The paper tackles the tension between security and performance in platform economy payments, where escrow-based centralized systems risk fund misuse and data leakage, while decentralized approaches suffer from volatility and latency. It proposes SecurePay, a hybrid system that combines a permissioned blockchain for information integrity with programmable Central Bank Digital Currencies for fund security, implemented with an on-chain/off-chain architecture. Key contributions include a full implementation on Hyperledger Fabric and OpenCBDC, a multi-party endorsement protocol, and a robust threat model with defenses such as dispute resolution and CBDC-based escrow. Evaluation shows SecurePay achieves 256.4 TPS and 4.29 s latency on commodity hardware, with resilience to reshipping and settlement-inconsistency attacks, indicating practical applicability for platform economy payments.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of platform economy, as it effectively addresses the trust dilemma between untrusted online buyers and merchants. However, malicious platforms can misuse users' funds and information, causing severe security concerns. Previous research efforts aimed at enhancing security in platform payment systems often sacrificed processing performance, while those focusing on processing efficiency struggled to completely prevent fund and information misuse. In this paper, we introduce SecurePay, a secure, yet performant payment processing system for platform economy. SecurePay is the first payment system that combines permissioned blockchain with central bank digital currency (CBDC) to ensure fund security, information security, and resistance to collusion by intermediaries; it also facilitates counter-party auditing, closed-loop regulation, and enhances operational efficiency for transaction settlement. We develop a full implementation of the proposed SecurePay system, and our experiments conducted on personal devices demonstrate a throughput of 256.4 transactions per second and an average latency of 4.29 seconds, demonstrating a comparable processing efficiency with a centralized system, with a significantly improved security level.

SecurePay: Enabling Secure and Fast Payment Processing for Platform Economy

TL;DR

The paper tackles the tension between security and performance in platform economy payments, where escrow-based centralized systems risk fund misuse and data leakage, while decentralized approaches suffer from volatility and latency. It proposes SecurePay, a hybrid system that combines a permissioned blockchain for information integrity with programmable Central Bank Digital Currencies for fund security, implemented with an on-chain/off-chain architecture. Key contributions include a full implementation on Hyperledger Fabric and OpenCBDC, a multi-party endorsement protocol, and a robust threat model with defenses such as dispute resolution and CBDC-based escrow. Evaluation shows SecurePay achieves 256.4 TPS and 4.29 s latency on commodity hardware, with resilience to reshipping and settlement-inconsistency attacks, indicating practical applicability for platform economy payments.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of platform economy, as it effectively addresses the trust dilemma between untrusted online buyers and merchants. However, malicious platforms can misuse users' funds and information, causing severe security concerns. Previous research efforts aimed at enhancing security in platform payment systems often sacrificed processing performance, while those focusing on processing efficiency struggled to completely prevent fund and information misuse. In this paper, we introduce SecurePay, a secure, yet performant payment processing system for platform economy. SecurePay is the first payment system that combines permissioned blockchain with central bank digital currency (CBDC) to ensure fund security, information security, and resistance to collusion by intermediaries; it also facilitates counter-party auditing, closed-loop regulation, and enhances operational efficiency for transaction settlement. We develop a full implementation of the proposed SecurePay system, and our experiments conducted on personal devices demonstrate a throughput of 256.4 transactions per second and an average latency of 4.29 seconds, demonstrating a comparable processing efficiency with a centralized system, with a significantly improved security level.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 25 sections, 8 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background and motivation
  3. Existing Payment Systems
  4. Central Bank Digital Currency
  5. Privacy-Preserving Techniques in Payment
  6. Research Motivations
  7. securepay system description
  8. Key Components
  9. Workflow
  10. Threat Model and Security Goals
  11. security analysis
  12. System Correctness
  13. System Liveness
  14. User Privacy
  15. implementation and evaluation
  16. ...and 10 more sections

Figures (8)

  • Figure 1: SecurePay system overview. Step 1-8 outlines the key interactions between on-chain and off-chain activities, starting from when a buyer initiates a trade to when the transaction is confirmed and closed.
  • Figure 2: Centralized payment system that relies on regulation for protecting fund security.
  • Figure 3: Decentralized payment system that relies on distributed power of recording transaction information.
  • Figure 4: Comparison of previous solutions and SecurePay on five functional indicators (Low-Medium-High).
  • Figure 5: High level technical design of SecurePay. The solid line represents fund processing and the dash line represents information processing.
  • ...and 3 more figures