PriChain: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Fine-Grained Redactable Blockchains in Decentralized Settings

Recently, redactable blockchain has been proposed and leveraged in a wide range of real systems for its unique properties of decentralization, traceability, and transparency while ensuring controllable on-chain data redaction. However, the development of redactable blockchain is now obstructed by three limitations, which are data privacy breaches, high communication overhead, and low searching efficiency, respectively. In this paper, we propose PriChain, the first efficient privacy-preserving fine-grained redactable blockchain in decentralized settings. PriChain provides data owners with rights to control who can read and redact on-chain data while maintaining downward compatibility, ensuring the one who can redact will be able to read. Specifically, inspired by the concept of multi-authority attribute-based encryption, we utilize the isomorphism of the access control tree, realizing fine-grained redaction mechanism, downward compatibility, and collusion resistance. With the newly designed structure, PriChain can realize $\mathcal{O}(n)$ communication and storage overhead compared to prior $\mathcal{O}(n^{2})$ schemes. Furthermore, we integrate multiple access trees into a tree-based dictionary, optimizing searching efficiency. Theoretical analysis proves that PriChain is secure against the chosen-plaintext attack and has competitive complexity. The experimental evaluations show that PriChain realizes $10\times$ efficiency improvement of searching and $100\times$ lower communication and storage overhead on average compared with existing schemes.