The blockchain can offer a dependable and secure platform for Internet of Things (IoT) transactions with its distributed and secure network architecture. Unfortunately, it faces challenges such as limited throughput, excessive computational costs, and high transaction fees. Off-chain scaling protocols are used to address the scalability of blockchain for their outstanding performance and efficiency. To mitigate the high-cost interactions with blockchain, previous studies only considered moving transactions of payment hubs (PHs) off-chain, utilizing off-chain operators to aggregate multiple transactions. However, existing PHs overly rely on central operators for system maintenance, greatly increasing the risk of Central Operator Failure (COF). Previous solutions allowed operators to submit Unsettled State Commitments (USC) to the blockchain and overlooked the pessimistic scenario that could lead to state rollbacks. To address these issues, this paper proposes an efficient multi-party payment protocol (HyperPay), aimed at utilizing the off-chain scaling technique to enhance transaction throughput and reduce on-chain cost. Specifically, we first propose a novel off-chain committee and Collateral-based Verifiable Random Leader Election (C-VRE) to elect leaders fairly, thus mitigating the COF problem. Additionally, we design a new state validation mechanism and One-Step Fraud Challenge (OSFC), enabling verifiers to directly construct fraud proofs and challenges on-chain, thereby preventing leaders from submitting USC. Our evaluation indicates that HyperPay reduces on-chain costs of challenge by 80% and boosts peak throughput by a factor of 10X-283X. A comprehensive theoretical analysis and experimental results substantiate the security and effectiveness of our proposed approach.

中文翻译：

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物联网小额支付的高效多方支付协议


区块链以其分布式、安全的网络架构，可以为物联网（IoT）交易提供可靠、安全的平台。不幸的是，它面临着吞吐量有限、计算成本过高和交易费用高昂等挑战。链下扩展协议用于解决区块链的可扩展性，以其出色的性能和效率。为了减轻与区块链的高成本交互，之前的研究仅考虑将支付中心（PH）的交易转移到链下，利用链下运营商聚合多个交易。然而，现有PH过度依赖中央运营商进行系统维护，大大增加了中央运营商故障（COF）的风险。以前的解决方案允许运营商向区块链提交未解决的状态承诺（USC），并忽略了可能导致状态回滚的悲观场景。为了解决这些问题，本文提出了一种高效的多方支付协议（HyperPay），旨在利用链下扩容技术来提高交易吞吐量并降低链上成本。具体来说，我们首先提出了一个新颖的链下委员会和基于抵押品的可验证随机领导者选举（C-VRE）来公平地选举领导者，从而缓解 COF 问题。此外，我们设计了一种新的状态验证机制和一步欺诈挑战（OSFC），使验证者能够直接在链上构建欺诈证明和挑战，从而防止领导者提交 USC。我们的评估表明，HyperPay 将挑战的链上成本降低了 80%，并将峰值吞吐量提高了 10 倍至 283 倍。 全面的理论分析和实验结果证实了我们提出的方法的安全性和有效性。