Privacy Preservation in Permissionless Blockchain: A Survey

Li Peng; Wei Feng; Zheng Yan; Yafeng Li; Xiaokang Zhou; Shohei Shimizu

doi:10.1016/j.dcan.2020.05.008

Privacy Preservation in Permissionless Blockchain: A Survey

Li Peng, Wei Feng, Zheng Yan^*, Yafeng Li, Xiaokang Zhou, Shohei Shimizu

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Review Article › peer-review

161 Citations (Scopus)

341 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Permissionless blockchain, as a kind of distributed ledger, has gained considerable attention because of its openness, transparency, decentralization, and immutability. Currently, permissionless blockchain has shown a good application prospect in many fields, from the initial cryptocurrency to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networking (VANET), which is considered as the beginning of rewriting our digital infrastructure. However, blockchain confronts some privacy risks that hinder its practical applications. Though numerous surveys reviewed the privacy preservation in blockchain, they failed to reveal the latest advances, nor have they been able to conduct a unified standard comprehensive classification of the privacy protection of permissionless blockchain. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the specific characteristics of permissionless blockchain, summarize the potential privacy threats, and investigate the unique privacy requirements of blockchain. Existing privacy preservation technologies are carefully surveyed and evaluated based on our proposed evaluation criteria. We finally figure out open research issues as well as future research directions from the perspective of privacy issues.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	295-307
Number of pages	13
Journal	Digital Communications and Networks
Volume	7
Issue number	3
Early online date	25 Jun 2020
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcan.2020.05.008
Publication status	Published - Aug 2021
MoE publication type	A2 Review article, Literature review, Systematic review

Funding

The work is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61672410 and 61802293 , the Academy of Finland under Grants 308087 , 314203 and 335262 , the Key Lab of Information Network Security , Ministry of Public Security under grant No. C18614 , the open grant of the Tactical Data Link Lab of the 20th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group Corporation , P.R. China under grant CLDL-20182119 , the National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents under grant BX20180238 , the Project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under grant 2018M633461 , the Shaanxi Innovation Team project under grant 2018TD-007 , and the 111 project under grant B16037 .

Keywords

Anonymity
Blockchain
Cryptocurrency
Privacy

Access to Document

10.1016/j.dcan.2020.05.008Licence: CC BY-NC-ND

ELEC_Peng_etal_Privacy_preservation_in_permissionless_blockchain_DCAN_2021Final published version, 1.07 MBLicence: CC BY-NC-ND

Cite this

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title = "Privacy Preservation in Permissionless Blockchain: A Survey",

abstract = "Permissionless blockchain, as a kind of distributed ledger, has gained considerable attention because of its openness, transparency, decentralization, and immutability. Currently, permissionless blockchain has shown a good application prospect in many fields, from the initial cryptocurrency to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networking (VANET), which is considered as the beginning of rewriting our digital infrastructure. However, blockchain confronts some privacy risks that hinder its practical applications. Though numerous surveys reviewed the privacy preservation in blockchain, they failed to reveal the latest advances, nor have they been able to conduct a unified standard comprehensive classification of the privacy protection of permissionless blockchain. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the specific characteristics of permissionless blockchain, summarize the potential privacy threats, and investigate the unique privacy requirements of blockchain. Existing privacy preservation technologies are carefully surveyed and evaluated based on our proposed evaluation criteria. We finally figure out open research issues as well as future research directions from the perspective of privacy issues.",

keywords = "Anonymity, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Privacy",

author = "Li Peng and Wei Feng and Zheng Yan and Yafeng Li and Xiaokang Zhou and Shohei Shimizu",

year = "2021",

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AU - Peng, Li

AU - Feng, Wei

AU - Yan, Zheng

AU - Li, Yafeng

AU - Zhou, Xiaokang

AU - Shimizu, Shohei

PY - 2021/8

Y1 - 2021/8

N2 - Permissionless blockchain, as a kind of distributed ledger, has gained considerable attention because of its openness, transparency, decentralization, and immutability. Currently, permissionless blockchain has shown a good application prospect in many fields, from the initial cryptocurrency to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networking (VANET), which is considered as the beginning of rewriting our digital infrastructure. However, blockchain confronts some privacy risks that hinder its practical applications. Though numerous surveys reviewed the privacy preservation in blockchain, they failed to reveal the latest advances, nor have they been able to conduct a unified standard comprehensive classification of the privacy protection of permissionless blockchain. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the specific characteristics of permissionless blockchain, summarize the potential privacy threats, and investigate the unique privacy requirements of blockchain. Existing privacy preservation technologies are carefully surveyed and evaluated based on our proposed evaluation criteria. We finally figure out open research issues as well as future research directions from the perspective of privacy issues.

AB - Permissionless blockchain, as a kind of distributed ledger, has gained considerable attention because of its openness, transparency, decentralization, and immutability. Currently, permissionless blockchain has shown a good application prospect in many fields, from the initial cryptocurrency to the Internet of Things (IoT) and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networking (VANET), which is considered as the beginning of rewriting our digital infrastructure. However, blockchain confronts some privacy risks that hinder its practical applications. Though numerous surveys reviewed the privacy preservation in blockchain, they failed to reveal the latest advances, nor have they been able to conduct a unified standard comprehensive classification of the privacy protection of permissionless blockchain. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the specific characteristics of permissionless blockchain, summarize the potential privacy threats, and investigate the unique privacy requirements of blockchain. Existing privacy preservation technologies are carefully surveyed and evaluated based on our proposed evaluation criteria. We finally figure out open research issues as well as future research directions from the perspective of privacy issues.

KW - Anonymity

KW - Blockchain

KW - Cryptocurrency

KW - Privacy

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U2 - 10.1016/j.dcan.2020.05.008

DO - 10.1016/j.dcan.2020.05.008

M3 - Review Article

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ER -

Privacy Preservation in Permissionless Blockchain: A Survey

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Privacy Preservation in Permissionless Blockchain: A Survey

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TruSoNet2: TruSoNet: Digitalizing Trust for Securing Pervasive Social Networking

Digitalizing Trust for Securing Pervasive Social Networking

TruSoNet: Digitalizing Trust for Securing Pervasive Social Networking

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