Accountable Fine-Grained Blockchain Rewriting in the Permissionless Setting

This article has supplementary downloadable material available at https://doi.org/10.1109/TIFS.2023.3340917, provided by the authors.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIFS.2023.3340917

ABSTRACT

Blockchain rewriting with fine-grained access control allows a user to create a transaction associated with a set of attributes, while a modifier who possesses sufficient rewriting privileges from a trusted authority satisfying the attribute set can anonymously rewrite the transaction. However, it lacks accountability and is not designed for open blockchains that require no centralized trust authority. In this work, we introduce accountable fine-grained blockchain rewriting in a permissionless setting. The property of accountability allows the modifier’s identity and their rewriting privileges to be held accountable for the modified transactions in case of malicious rewriting. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we present a generic framework for secure blockchain rewriting in the permissionless setting. Second, we present an instantiation of our framework and show its practicality through evaluation analysis. Last, we demonstrate that our proof-of-concept implementation can be effectively integrated into open blockchains.

AUTHORS

Yangguang Tian , Bowen Liu, Yingjiu Li , Pawel Szalachowski , and Jianying Zhou