[ad_1]
A new specification from Ripple’s software developers’ proposal would allow users to send private transactions to each other using the XRP ledger.
In a presentation on GitHub earlier this week, Ripple engineer Nik Bougalis said he and a group of other Ripple developers had designed a new private payment system for the XRP ledger to protect exchange users from malicious third parties.
Bougalis, XRP’s server software manager, said a “hidden tag” system would make private transactions on the ledger possible. They would present a series of numbers that would only be meaningful to the intended recipient and would appear random to everyone else.
“[I]If blinded tags are in use, an attacker who can observe each payment transaction will not be able to isolate a pair of transactions that reference the same non-blind tag, ”Bougalis said.
Cryptocurrency exchanges keep users’ XRP in the same wallet address, which is separated into various sub-wallets. To distinguish between different holdings, sub-wallets use 32-bit source and destination tags to identify a recipient of the transaction.
Currently, tags are publicly viewable and, if used frequently, can be associated with a particular user. Some exchanges already generate new tags for each transaction, but only a finite number of tags are available. While this isn’t an immediate problem, there comes a point where exchanges won’t be able to generate new tags.
Bougalis’s proposal would also mean that users could enable or disable blinded tags. They would work as a single function so the network doesn’t get overloaded.
The use of hidden tags not only protects the identity of users, but also acts as an effective “workaround” to preserve the number of destination and source tags available for exchanges, Bougalis added. As Blinded Tags leverage an existing tag infrastructure in exchanges, it’s unclear whether users sending XRP between independent wallets would be able to do so privately.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Ripple intends to add blind tags in the near future or if this is a more exploratory suggestion. A spokesperson said they were receiving feedback and would look into it if 80% of the trust validators supported the proposal.
CoinDesk reached out to Bougalis for comment but received no response when we went to press
UPDATE (April 3 14:40 UTC): This article has been updated to include comments from a Ripple spokesperson.
