Secure Credit Reporting on the Blockchain
This addresses privacy and security issues in credit reporting for consumers and lenders, offering a decentralized alternative to traditional systems.
The paper tackles the problem of centralized credit reporting by proposing a blockchain-based system that replaces third-party agencies with smart contracts, enabling customers to control their data disclosure and lenders to verify data integrity, eliminating risks like the 2017 Equifax breach.
We present a secure approach for maintaining and reporting credit history records on the Blockchain. Our approach removes third-parties such as credit reporting agencies from the lending process and replaces them with smart contracts. This allows customers to interact directly with the lenders or banks while ensuring the integrity, unmalleability and privacy of their credit data. Most importantly, each customer is given full control over complete or selective disclosure of her credit records, eliminating the risk of privacy violations or data breaches such as the one that happened to Equifax in 2017. Moreover, our approach provides strong guarantees for the lenders as well. A lender can check both correctness and completeness of the credit data disclosed to her. This is the first approach that is able to perform all real-world credit reporting tasks without a central authority or changing the financial mechanisms.