Techniques for Private Transactions in Corporate Blockchain Networks

Blockchain platforms are generally applied to automate operations using a trusted environment with broadcast messaging and distributed data storing. At the same time corporates still have business requirements to also send confidential peer-to-peer messages or private transactions. Mainly these requirements derive from the law obligations (bank secrecy, GDPR, etc.) and the necessity to protect competitive market advantages. Blockchain platforms for public networks ignore requirements for private transactions due to user anonymity and the absence of personal data in blockchain networks. Enterprise blockchain platforms for corporate networks mostly address confidential issues by transferring private data through trusted third parties (TTP) or intermediaries, and off-chain peer-to-peer messaging. However, these approaches miss core blockchain advantages of a trusted environment - immutability and integrity of private data. This article introduces a new technique and its implementation of private transactions in a blockchain that is based on both off-chain peer-to-peer messaging with confidential data and broadcast transactions that contain hashes of private data to verify immutability and integrity. The article provides technical details of the method, also performance issues are discussed.