How to know who sends me the notes?

Aztec
1

Working with the CreditScore feedback partner we realized that in the current design of the token contract, I can receive notes, but not know who sent it to me. This becomes important when for example you receive money from friends but aren’t sure which ones are yet to pay you back OR in a credit score system, I may want to prove that I indeed got the salary from Aztec and not meme company.

in general:

  • from might want to prove that they sent the note
  • to might want to prove that from sent them a note

Design 1 - Add from field in ValueNote

I first thought this made the ValueNote like an NFT since notes become different if they are from different senders. But in our UXTO model, this isn’t true as I can spend the value note as long as I am the owner. And I can always combine multiple notes into one and change from to my address.

However, this increases the cost of publishing the encrypted log to L1 by a Field element.

Note that, from can be optional i.e. you can pass a 0x0 if you truly don’t want to reveal your address.

However, there is nothing stopping anyone from lying about from.

Design 2 - Add from and signature to ValueNote

You sign the preimage of the note {from, to, amount} with your private key and add this signature as part of the note.

This increases the cost of the encrypted log by yet another field.

Design 3 - Create a new note revealing the from address + a signature

This is nice because it can be strictly optional to create such a note.
But of course, there is a limit on how many notes we can create in a transaction.

Design 4 - Use Emit encrypted log to send sensitive information

If we change how we process events i.e. make it such that emit_encrypted_log works for non-notes too, we could use it as a message-passing mechanism.

This has been discussed in detail in the offsite to enable unencrypted private notes to be added automatically here and involves refactoring events to emit when log is about a note and when it is not.

Any other good designs?

Shoutout to @alexghr for feedback.

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2

Doesn’t the logic of the token contract enforce that the from stored in the ValueNote is correct?

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3

The beauty of a programmable private smart contract platform is that contract devs can solve this in many ways :slight_smile:
The sender could directly include their from address in the note (and this can be constrained to be msg.sender).
You could include a memo field, which can be populated with arbitrary (unconstrained) information.
You could prove the sender is on some whitelist, or not on some blacklist.
The sender could prove their own credit score, without revealing who they are. (I’m giving this example just because of your use case).

If we introduce a note tagging scheme (to make note discovery more efficient), note ciphertexts will be tagged (with a tag which pre-established through a handshake between both parties), so the sender could be inferred from the tag that’s been used.

63 Likes
4

What is the cost difference between creating a new note constructing and emitting an encrypted log? I imagine the latter to be cheaper, where notes are better for the situation where multiple parties could consume it.

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