CSC News

Scafuro to Study Privacy in Blockchains

Dr. Alessandra Scafuro, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NC State, has been awarded $249,922 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support her research proposal entitled “A Broad Treatment of Privacy in Blockchains.”  The award runs from September 1, 2017 to August 31, 2020.

A blockchain is a public, distributed, append-only database whose consistency is maintained by the combined work of users across the world rather than a single party.  These blockchains avoid single points of failure and trust by granting access to those across the globe. However, public blockchains raise privacy concerns on many fronts including the restricted case of blockchains used for financial transactions.

Abstract - A blockchain is a public, distributed, append-only database whose consistency is maintained by the combined work of users across the world rather than a single party, thus avoiding single points of failure and trust. The public nature of the blockchain, however, raises important privacy concerns. Existing work partially addressed privacy concerns for the restricted case of blockchains used for financial transactions. As blockchains are set to be used in a variety of contexts, proposed work will initiate a broad treatment of privacy definition and provide constructions achieving new privacy goals that can be implemented across different blockchains.

~scanlon~