Fair Data Exchange with Constant-Time Proofs

The Fair Data Exchange (FDE) protocol introduced at CCS 2024 offers atomic pay-per-file transfers with constant-size proofs, but its prover and verifier runtimes still scale linearly with the file length n. We collapse these costs to essentially constant by viewing the file as a rate-1 Reed-Solomon (RS) codeword, extending it to a lower-rate RS code with constant redundancy, encrypting this extended vector, and then proving correctness for only a small random subset of the resulting ciphertexts; RS decoding repairs any corrupted symbols with negligible failure probability. Our protocol preserves full client- and server-fairness, and adds only a tunable communication redundancy overhead.Finally, we patch the elliptic-curve mismatch in the Bitcoin instantiation of FDE with a compact zk-SNARK, enabling the entire exchange to run off-chain and falling back to just two on-chain transactions when channels are unavailable.

@article{khabbazian2025_2506.14944,
  title={ Fair Data Exchange with Constant-Time Proofs },
  author={ Majid Khabbazian },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.14944},
  year={ 2025 }
}