Secure and Private Fountain Code based Architecture for Blockchains

Japneet Singh, Adrish Banerjee, Hamid R. Sadjadpour

Abstract: Recently, different architectures based on coding theory have been proposed to reduce the storage and communication costs associated with a blockchain system. However, many of these methods have high bandwidth requirements for repairing the share of a failed node or decoding a particular requested block. The bandwidth required for decoding a requested block becomes an important factor in some blockchain applications like healthcare, where historical data needs to be frequently accessed. In this work, we introduce two new architectures for blockchain-based systems, which reduce the storage and communication costs associated with blockchain’s historical data and simultaneously provides confidentiality of the stored data. The two protocols are designed using a combination of fountain codes and a proposed communication and repair efficient secret sharing scheme. We also present a construction of the secret sharing scheme which meets our requirements.