Data Protection and Export for Transaction Ledgers in Permissioned Blockchain Platforms
James Massengille, Trey Burks, Richard Mitchell, Jarett Tice, Denis A. Ulybyshev · 2022
Blockchain provides an innovative architecture to store data in a decentralized nature and allows the ability to verify every transaction at any time in the future. According to Google Scholar™ web search engine, since 2018 there are about 116,000 scholarly documents found for the search query “blockchain” and about 82,000 scholarly documents found for the search query “blockchain technology”. As of January 24, 2022, the market cap for all cryptocurrencies exceeds 1.65 trillion dollars. It is essential to secure the ledger of transactions in blockchain-based systems so that only authorized parties can access it. Furthermore, fine-grained role-based access control and secure data export for the ledger of transactions are highly desirable. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for encrypting the transaction ledger through the chaincode. The solution provides transaction data confidentiality in permissioned blockchain networks. We will show the viability of our approach by integrating it into IBM®Hyperledger®Fabric 2.3 framework. It is an open-source project for a permissioned blockchain system that utilizes smart contracts to implement business logic whilst maintaining the core blockchain properties. We also propose using a mechanism for exporting transactions in a protected form from private permissioned blockchain systems to authorized external entities, supporting fine-grained role-based and attribute-based access control. This mechanism relies on encrypted spreadsheet files and provides confidentiality, integrity, and origin integrity for exported transaction data outside the permissioned blockchain network. The solution could stimulate a wider deployment of permissioned blockchain systems.