Differential Privacy in Blockchain Technology: A Futuristic Approach

TL;DR

This paper explores integrating differential privacy into blockchain technology to enhance data privacy, discussing methods, challenges, and future applications in decentralized systems.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive analysis of applying differential privacy across blockchain layers and scenarios, highlighting novel privacy-preserving approaches.

Findings

Differential privacy can be integrated into blockchain layers to improve data privacy.

The approach addresses privacy concerns without compromising blockchain transparency.

Future challenges include balancing privacy and decentralization in blockchain applications.

Abstract

Blockchain has received a widespread attention because of its decentralized, tamper-proof, and transparent nature. Blockchain works over the principle of distributed, secured, and shared ledger, which is used to record, and track data within a decentralized network. This technology has successfully replaced certain systems of economic transactions in organizations and has the potential to overtake various industrial business models in future. Blockchain works over peer-to-peer (P2P) phenomenon for its operation and does not require any trusted-third party authorization for data tracking and storage. The information stored in blockchain is distributed throughout the decentralized network and is usually protected using cryptographic hash functions. Since the beginning of blockchain technology, its use in different applications is increasing exponentially, but this increased use has also raised some questions regarding privacy and security of data being stored in it. Protecting privacy of blockchain data using data perturbation strategy such as differential privacy could be a novel approach to overcome privacy issues in blockchain. In this article, we cover the topic of integration of differential privacy in each layer of blockchain and in certain blockchain based scenarios. Moreover, we highlight some future challenges and application scenarios in which integration of differential privacy in blockchain can produce fruitful results.