Bringing Private Reads to Hyperledger Fabric via Private Information Retrieval
Artur Iasenovets, Fei Tang, Huihui Zhu, Ping Wang, Lei Liu

TL;DR
This paper introduces a PIR-based private read mechanism for Hyperledger Fabric, enabling encrypted queries to protect sensitive data while maintaining blockchain integrity, with promising performance metrics and scalability insights.
Contribution
It presents the first implementation of PIR-enabled private reads in Hyperledger Fabric, integrating ciphertext-plaintext homomorphic multiplication within chaincode.
Findings
Achieves 113 ms average latency for private reads
Peer-side execution time below 42 ms
Supports up to 512 records of 64 bytes each in large configurations
Abstract
Permissioned blockchains ensure integrity and auditability of shared data but expose query parameters to peers during read operations, creating privacy risks for organizations querying sensitive records. This paper proposes a Private Information Retrieval (PIR) mechanism to enable private reads from Hyperledger Fabric's world state, allowing endorsing peers to process encrypted queries without learning which record is accessed. We implement and benchmark a PIR-enabled chaincode that performs ciphertext-plaintext (ct-pt) homomorphic multiplication directly within evaluate transactions, preserving Fabric's endorsement and audit semantics. The prototype achieves an average end-to-end latency of 113 ms and a peer-side execution time below 42 ms, with approximately 2 MB of peer network traffic per private read in development mode--reducible by half under in-process deployment. Storage…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCryptography and Data Security · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
