Studies from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Provide New Data on Information Technology (A Privacy-preserving Data Feed Scheme for Smart Contracts): Information Technology

2022 FEB 28 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- Data detailed on Information Technology have been presented. According to news reporting originating in Nanjing, People’s Republic of China, by NewsRx editors, the research stated, “Smart contracts are becoming more and more popular in financial scenarios like medical insurance. Rather than traditional schemes, using smart contracts as a medium is a better choice for both participants, as it is fairer, more reliable, more efficient, and enables real-time payment.”

Funders for this research include National Key R&D Program of China, Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation, Shenzhen Science and Technology Program.

The news reporters obtained a quote from the research from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, “However, medical insurance contracts need to input the patient’s condition information as the judgment logic to trigger subsequent execution. Since the blockchain is a closed network, it lacks a secure network environment for data interaction with the outside world. The Data feed aims to provide the service of the on-chain and off-chain data interaction. Existing researches on the data feed has solved the security problems on it effectively, such as Town Crier, TLS-N and they have also taken into account the privacy-preserving problems. However, these schemes cannot actually protect privacy because when the ciphertext data is executed by the contract, privacy information can still be inferred by analyzing the transaction results, since states of the contract are publicly visible. In this paper, based on zero-knowledge proof and Hawk technology, a on-and-off-chain complete smart contract data feed privacy-preserving scheme is proposed. In order to present our scheme more intuitively, we combined the medical insurance compensation case to implement it, which is called MIPDF. In our MIPDF, the patient and the insurance company are parties involved in the contract, and the hospital is the data provider of data feed. The patient’s medical data is sent to the smart contract under the umbrella of the zero-knowledge proof signature scheme. The smart contract verifies the proof and calculates the insurance premium based on the judgment logic. Meanwhile, we use Hawk technology to ensure the privacy of on-chain contract execution, so that no information will be disclosed due to the result of contract execution. We give a general description of our scheme within the Universal Composability (UC) framework. We experiment and evaluate MIPDF on Ethereum for in-depth analysis.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “The results show that our scheme can securely and efficiently support the functions of medical insurance and achieve complete privacy-preserving.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: A Privacy-preserving Data Feed Scheme for Smart Contracts. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 2022;E105D(2):195-204. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems can be contacted at: Ieice-inst Electronics Information Communication Engineers, Kikai-Shinko-Kaikan Bldg, 3-5-8, Shiba-Koen, Minato-Ku, Tokyo, 105-0011, Japan.

Our news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Hao Wang, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1587/transinf.2021BCI0001. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)