A Privacy-Preserving Data Feed Scheme for Smart Contracts

SUMMARY 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. 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. The results show that our scheme can securely and efficiently support the functions of medical insurance and achieve complete privacy-preserving.