Enigma: Decentralized Computation Platform with Guaranteed Privacy

By Guy Zyskind, Oz Nathan, Alex Pentland. arXiv.org, 2015

466 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A peer-to-peer network, enabling different parties to jointly store and run computations on data while keeping the data completely private. Enigma's computational model is based on a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation, guaranteed by a verifiable secret-sharing scheme. For storage, we use a modified distributed hashtable for holding secret-shared data. An external blockchain is utilized as the controller of the network, manages access control, identities and serves as a tamper-proof log of events. Security deposits and fees incentivize operation, correctness and fairness of the system. Similar to Bitcoin, Enigma removes the need for a trusted third party, enabling autonomous control of personal data. For the first time, users are able to share their data with cryptographic guarantees regarding their privacy.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55339bb4044d80b97add783a97e02ac38c149cbc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Information Systems

Citations in the corpus

An Overview on Smart Contracts: Challenges, Advances and Platforms (2019, unknown): “Enigma [75] offers a solution to the secrecy of smart contract execution.”
Applications of blockchain in ensuring the security and privacy of electronic health record systems: A survey (2020, unknown): “Encryption scheme is a relatively common method, such as public key encryption (PKE), symmetric key encryption (SKE), secure multi-party computation (MPC) ( Zyskind et al., 2015 ) and so on.”
Healthcare Data Gateways: Found Healthcare Intelligence on Blockchain with Novel Privacy Risk Control (2016, methodology): “So if the purpose is just for processing, we adopt one secure data processing model, which is to never allow a service to observe the raw data, but instead, to let it run computations directly on the blockchain network and obtain the final results, which may be implemented by utilizing MPC (Secure M”
Blockchain and IoT Integration: A Systematic Survey (2018, background): “(v) An off-chain technology (DHT) Enigma [91] linked to a BC.”
A Survey on Blockchain Interoperability: Past, Present, and Future Trends (2020, background): “Public Connectors started emerging as early as 2015 [202], when researchers and practitioners alike saw the potential in cross-chain transactions to support, for instance, atomic swaps [34, 58, 90] and payment channels [144].”
Towards Blockchain-based Auditable Storage and Sharing of IoT Data (2017, background): “Enigma [33, 34] is the closest to our approach in that it uses the blockchain for access control and enables sharing of off-chain stored data.”
Overview of business innovations and research opportunities in blockchain and introduction to the special issue (2016, background): “Zyskind et al. (2015) proposed a lightweight blockchain architecture to protect personal data.”
Hawk: The Blockchain Model of Cryptography and Privacy-Preserving Smart Contracts (2016, background): “Hawk also allows the programmer to define additional rules, as part of the Hawk contract, that govern financial fairness.”
Integrated Blockchain and Edge Computing Systems: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges (2019, methodology): “Enigma proposed in [57] is an early exploration of using blockchain to enable different parties to jointly do the task of data storage and data computation.”
Private Data Objects: an Overview (2018, methodology): “Enigma [20] proposes the use of Secure Multi-Party Computation as a building block for the decentralized execution of SCs on private data, while relying on an external blockchainbased DL for identity management, access control and a tamper-proof event log.”
MeDShare: Trust-Less Medical Data Sharing Among Cloud Service Providers via Blockchain (2017, methodology): “[28] used the blockchain for access control management and for audit log security purposes, as a tamper proof log of events.”
Security and Privacy on Blockchain (2019, methodology): “SMPC Enigma [96] It allows multi-party to carry out some computation jointly over their private data inputs without violating their input privacy.”
Applications of Blockchains in the Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, methodology): “transactional model of the blockchain, the block headers or smart contract conditions [33], [102], [103].”
A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues of Bitcoin (2017, background): “Similar to Bitcoins, authors in [150] proposes Enigma, a decentralized computation platform which provides a highly optimized version of secure multi-party computation with guaranteed privacy to effectively execute smart contracts.”
BBDS: Blockchain-Based Data Sharing for Electronic Medical Records in Cloud Environments (2017, unknown): “[21] used the blockchain for access control management and for audit log security purposes, as a tamper proof log of events.”
Towards Post-Quantum Blockchain: A Review on Blockchain Cryptography Resistant to Quantum Computing Attacks (2020, methodology): “An example of the use of SMPC on a blockchain is Enigma [249], which first stores hashes on a blockchain and then the related data on”