Onionchain: Towards Balancing Privacy and Traceability of Blockchain-Based Applications
It addresses privacy and traceability issues for blockchain users, but appears incremental as it integrates existing mechanisms.
The paper tackles the challenge of balancing privacy and traceability in blockchain applications by proposing Onionchain, a suite of protocols inspired by onion routing, which is validated through security analysis and experiments in a vehicular ad hoc network case-study.
With the popularity of Blockchain comes grave security-related concerns. Achieving privacy and traceability simultaneously remains an open question. Efforts have been made to address the issues, while they may subject to specific scenarios. This paper studies how to provide a more general solution for this open question. Concretely, we propose Onionchain, featuring a suite of protocols, offering both traceability and privacy. As the term implies, our Onionchain is inspired by Onion routing. We investigate the principles of Onion routing carefully and integrate its mechanism together with Blockchain technology. We advocate the Blockchain community to adopt Onionchain with the regards of privacy and traceability. To this end, a case-study of Onionchain, which runs in the context of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), is proposed, providing the community a guideline to follow. Systematic security analysis and extensive experiments are also conducted to validate our secure and cost-effective Onionchain.