Cloak: Hiding Retrieval Information in Blockchain Systems via Distributed Query Requests

• Published in: IEEE transactions on services computing 2024-11, Vol.17 (6), p.3213-3226
• Main Authors: Xiao, Jiang, Chang, Jian, Lin, Licheng, Li, Binhong, Dai, Xiaohai, Xiong, Zehui, Choo, Kim-Kwang Raymond, Gai, Keke, Jin, Hai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blockchain; Blockchains; Data privacy; distributed query; Encryption; lightweight client; Noise; Privacy; privacy-preserving; Protection; Query processing
• ISSN: 1939-1374; 2372-0204
• DOI: 10.1109/TSC.2024.3411450

The privacy-preserving query is critical for modern blockchain systems, especially when supporting many crucial applications such as finance and healthcare. Recent advances in blockchain query schemes mainly focus on enhancing the traceability efficiency of integrity authentication. Despite these efforts, we argue that the exposure of retrieval information may result in privacy leakage, which inevitably poses an important yet unresolved challenge. In this paper, we introduce Cloak, a novel privacy-preserving blockchain query scheme with two notable features. First, it utilizes a two-phase distributed query requests technique, i.e., division and aggregation, to hide retrieval information based on the natural independent characteristic of blockchain. Second, we add noise to the sub-request set to avoid malicious attacks during transmission and adopt smart contract-based asymmetric encryption to guarantee the correctness of query results. Experimental results demonstrate that Cloak improves the query performance by up to 4× and reduces the storage overhead by 50% compared with the state-of-the-art Spiral.