Scientific Reports (Jan 2024)

A privacy-preserving scheme with multi-level regulation compliance for blockchain

  • Wangjing Jia,
  • Tao Xie,
  • Baolai Wang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-50209-x
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 1
pp. 1 – 14

Abstract

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Abstract With the increasing presence of blockchain-based distributed applications in various aspects of daily life, there has been a growing focus on the privacy protection of blockchain ledgers and the corresponding regulatory technologies. However, current mainstream solutions primarily concentrate on the verifiable encryption of blockchain transaction addresses and contents, neglecting the regulatory requirements for private transactions. Moreover, the few monitorable solutions suffer from issues such as excessive centralization and a single-minded approach to regulatory content. To address these deficiencies, this paper proposes a blockchain privacy-preserving scheme that supports multi-level regulation through the utilization of zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) and attribute-based encryption (ABE). Firstly, by leveraging zk-SNARKs, this scheme achieves blockchain privacy-preserving within an account model, enabling the concealment of user transaction addresses and values. Secondly, by employing attribute-based encryption, a multi-level regulatory model is developed alongside the privacy protection measures, allowing for selective disclosure of transaction content. Finally, we analyze the security of the proposed scheme and compare it with other schemes, discussing its advantages in terms of privacy, security, and regulatory capabilities, we also provide a preliminary evaluation of the scheme's efficiency through experiments. In conclusion, the scheme demonstrates strong privacy by relying on mathematical proofs through zk-SNARKs to ensure security while comprehensively safeguarding content. It also achieves multi-level regulation on the foundation of privacy protection, with comprehensive regulatory coverage and decentralized regulatory authority.