A Survey on Privacy Vulnerabilities in Permissionless Blockchains

Blockchain decentralization not only ensures transparency of transactions to eliminate need of trusting third party, but also makes the transactions of the network to be publicly accessible to all the participating peers in the network. As a result, data anonymity and confidentiality are compromised making several business enterprises and industrialists hesitant to adopt the technology. Although research community has proposed various privacy-preserving solutions for blockchain, however, they still lack in efficiency resulting in distrust of industries in opting for the technology. This study is conducted for contributing to the existing body of knowledge corresponding to privacy in blockchains. The fundamental goal of this study is to delve into privacy vulnerabilities of the blockchain network in a permissionless setting by identifying non-trivial roots of factors causing privacy breach in blockchain and presenting limitation of existing privacy preserving mechanisms. Studies with superficial comparison of privacy preserving techniques are available in literature but a detailed and in-depth analysis of their limitations and causes of privacy breach in blockchain is yet not done. Therefore, in this paper we first present comprehensive analysis of various privacy breaching factors of the blockchain networks. Next, we discuss existing cryptographic and non-cryptographic solutions in literature. We found out that these existing privacy preserving mechanisms have their own set of limitations and hence are inefficient at current point of time. The existing privacy preserving mechanisms need further consideration of the research community before they’re widely adopted and benchmarked. Therefore, in the end, we identified some future directions that need to be addressed to model an efficient privacy preserving mechanism for wider adoption of the blockchain technology.