Privacy : focused blockchain

• Main Author: Chin, Zhi Xian
• Other Authors: Sourav Sen Gupta
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Data::Coding and information theory; DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software::Software engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/77057
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Privacy is one of the major challenges which blockchain systems face today as there is a requirement to publish all transactions of each block in each node and all information is exposed to public scrutiny. Although there are privacy-related libraries available on blockchain which distributed applications can use, there are currently no applications which use these libraries as the designed applications are extremely basic. In this paper, we introduce a decentralized application which is a proof-of-concept utilising zero-knowledge proofs hiding the birth date of the user while retaining the ability to prove that the user is above a to-be-determined age. The decentralized application was designed through the analysis of the capabilities of the libraries as well as the investigation of potential uses which zero-knowledge proof can provide in scenarios where a user might desire a higher level of privacy. Testing of this proof-of-concept proved that it is highly feasible in terms of financial and temporal cost and these are comparable to that of current alternatives. In the future, this proof-of-concept can be extended to other decentralized application, other uses and even other blockchains as this implementation was designed with extensibility and potential blockchain agnosticism in mind.