Enigma: Decentralized Computation Platform with Guaranteed Privacy
It addresses the challenge of data privacy in decentralized systems for users seeking autonomous control over personal data, representing a novel approach rather than an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling decentralized, privacy-preserving computation on data without a trusted third party, achieving this through a peer-to-peer network that uses optimized secure multi-party computation and a blockchain for management.
A peer-to-peer network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private. Enigma's computational model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation, guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, we use a modified distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data. An external blockchain is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system. Similar to Bitcoin, Enigma removes the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data. For the first time, users are able to share their data with cryptographic guarantees regarding their privacy.