Hawk: The Blockchain Model of Cryptography and Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts
Abstract
Emerging smart contract systems over decentralized cryptocurrencies allow mutually distrustful parties to transact safely without trusted third parties. In the event of contractual breaches or aborts, the decentralized blockchain ensures that honest parties obtain commensurate compensation. Existing systems, however, lack transactional privacy. All transactions, including flow of money between pseudonyms and amount transacted, are exposed on the blockchain. We present Hawk, a decentralized smart contract system that does not store financial transactions in the clear on the blockchain, thus retaining transactional privacy from the public's view. A Hawk programmer can write a private smart contract in an intuitive manner without having to implement cryptography, and our compiler automatically generates an efficient cryptographic protocol where contractual parties interact with the blockchain, using cryptographic primitives such as zero-knowledge proofs. To formally define and reason about the security of our protocols, we are the first to formalize the blockchain model of cryptography. The formal modeling is of independent interest. We advocate the community to adopt such a formal model when designing applications atop decentralized blockchains.
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The proposed solution uses smart contracts to handle data in the ledger.
“In addition, the proposed solution makes use of smart contracts [24] (also known as chaincodes ) to handle data into the ledger.”
From A Trusted Approach for Decentralised and Privacy-Preserving Identity Management (2021) · cites this paper as [24]
Smart contracts are decentralized, immutable, and transparent, making it possible to provide the architecture with fully auditable and secure processes.
“Smart contracts are decentralized, immutable, and transparent, making it possible to provide the architecture with fully auditable and secure processes.”
From A Trusted Approach for Decentralised and Privacy-Preserving Identity Management (2021) · cites this paper as [24]
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“Hawk [24], Zcash [25] or Zerocoin [26] are cryptocurrencies that already add privacy features such as zero-knowledge proofs or linkability controls.”
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- Authors
- Kosba, A., Miller, A., Shi, E., Wen, Z., & Papamanthou, C.
- Affiliations
- University of Maryland, College Park (US)
- Cornell University (US)
- Venue
- 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2016-05
- Pages
- 839-858
- ISSN
- 1081-6011 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2517744317
- Cited by
- 2,227
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 57 · 2025: 130 · 2024: 184 · 2023: 242 · 2022: 226 · 2021: 329 · 2020: 344 · 2019: 366 · 2018: 225 · 2017: 94 · 2016: 24 · 2015: 6
- FWCI
- 201.04
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Cryptography and Data Security
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Advanced Authentication Protocols Security
- Keywords
- blockchain, smart contracts, zero-knowledge proofs, formal security model
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