A Novel Approach for Providing Client-Verifiable and Efficient Access to Private Smart Contracts

Distributed Ledger Technology is a powerful tool to support direct collaboration between organisations, without requiring full trust into a centralised infrastructure. By defining a program logic and access policies with smart contracts, all interactions are verified in the distributed network and the history of the data is recorded on the ledger. Blockchain implementations targeting enterprise use cases also provide means for private transactions, where the content of the transaction is only readable by authorized participants. Direct access to the ledger requires a node with reliable connection to the network and sufficient computational resources, which usually cannot be fulfilled with lightweight Internet of Things devices and mobile applications. We present an advanced system for accessing an enterprise Blockchain through dedicated gateway nodes, while preserving the functionality of private transactions. A hybrid approach is used to allow computation- and storage restricted clients to send private transactions through a central gateway, and use Light Ethereum Subprotocol to verify the data integrity based on proofs from distributed nodes. To increase the client-side security level, we introduce a dedicated Hardware Security Module for key management and efficient execution of the cryptographic primitives. A proof-of-concept implementation, using the Quorum Blockchain client and an extension for the Tessera transaction manager, validates the feasibility of the approach and can be used for further research in this field.