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Information Privacy in Decentralized Applications

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Trust Models for Next-Generation Blockchain Ecosystems

Part of the book series: EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing ((EAISICC))

Abstract

Numerous reviews of decentralized applications using Blockchain have been published in recent years. However, these have predominantly focused on how applications map to the characteristics of underlying protocols and discuss privacy only in passing. This chapter takes a more focused perspective by analyzing recently proposed prominent decentralized applications, categorizing them according to information privacy requirements. Three dimensions emerge as key differentiators: accessibility requirements (i.e., whether an application needs to be publicly accessible), hierarchicality requirements (i.e., the notion of different types of participants with fundamentally different permissions), and requirements on joint verifiability of transaction data (i.e., which subset of an application’s data model needs to be verifiable by others). Grouping applications along these dimensions, it becomes clear that use cases with closed accessibility requirements are most dominant in the market today. These use cases can establish information privacy through governance, deliberate data modeling, and role-based access management.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For this chapter, the term “Blockchain” refers to any type of “Distributed Ledger Technology,” even if it does not make use of the “block” concept, first described by Nakamoto [2].

  2. 2.

    GDPR has been discussed extensively in the context of Blockchain and was found to be incompatible with certain Blockchain technologies [37].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, King’s College London, London, UK

    Moritz Platt

  2. Faculty of Business and Law, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Ruwan J. Bandara

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Bucharest, Bucureşti, Romania

    Andreea-Elena Drăgnoiu

  4. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India

    Sreelakshmi Krishnamoorthy

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  1. Moritz Platt
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  2. Ruwan J. Bandara
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  3. Andreea-Elena Drăgnoiu
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  4. Sreelakshmi Krishnamoorthy
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Correspondence to Moritz Platt .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences, King’s College London, London, UK

    Muhammad Habib ur Rehman

  2. Center for Cyber-Physical Systems, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Davor Svetinovic

  3. Center for Cyber-Physical Systems, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Khaled Salah

  4. SEcure Service-Oriented Architectures Research (SESAR) Group, Università degli Studi di Milano, Crema (CR), Italy

    Ernesto Damiani

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Platt, M., Bandara, R.J., Drăgnoiu, AE., Krishnamoorthy, S. (2021). Information Privacy in Decentralized Applications. In: Rehman, M.H.u., Svetinovic, D., Salah, K., Damiani, E. (eds) Trust Models for Next-Generation Blockchain Ecosystems. EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75107-4_4

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