ShadowBlock: Efficient Dynamic Anonymous Blocklisting and Its Cross-chain Application

TL;DR

ShadowBlock is a novel, efficient scheme for dynamic anonymous blocklisting that enhances privacy and verification speed, with promising applications in cross-chain identity management.

Contribution

It introduces ShadowBlock, combining pseudorandom functions and cryptographic accumulators with zero-knowledge proofs for improved efficiency and dynamism in anonymous blocklisting.

Findings

Outperforms existing schemes in efficiency and dynamism

Enables anonymous proof of non-membership in blocklists

Supports efficient updates and reusability of proofs

Abstract

Online harassment, incitement to violence, racist behavior, and other harmful content on social media can damage social harmony and even break the law. Traditional blocklisting technologies can block malicious users, but this comes at the expense of identity privacy. The anonymous blocklisting has emerged as an effective mechanism to restrict the abuse of freedom of speech while protecting user identity privacy. However, the state-of-the-art anonymous blocklisting schemes suffer from either poor dynamism or low efficiency. In this paper, we propose $\mathsf{ShadowBlock}$, an efficient dynamic anonymous blocklisting scheme. Specifically, we utilize the pseudorandom function and cryptographic accumulator to construct the public blocklisting, enabling users to prove they are not on the blocklisting in an anonymous manner. To improve verification efficiency, we design an aggregation zero-knowledge proof mechanism that converts multiple verification operations into a single one. In addition, we leverage the accumulator's property to achieve efficient updates of the blocklisting, i.e., the original proof can be reused with minimal updates rather than regenerating the entire proof. Experiments show that $\mathsf{ShadowBlock}$ has better dynamics and efficiency than the existing schemes. Finally, the discussion on applications indicates that $\mathsf{ShadowBlock}$ also holds significant value and has broad prospects in emerging fields such as cross-chain identity management.