Privacy with Pantheon Ethereum Java Client

This article is taken from the pantheon documentation

Privacy in Pantheon refers to the ability to keep transactions private between the involved parties. Other parties cannot access the transaction content, sending party, or list of participating parties.

For production systems requiring private transactions, we recommend using a network with a consensus mechanism supporting transaction finality. For example, IBFT 2.0.

Privacy in Pantheon: How PegaSys Has Redefined Blockchain for Enterprises


Private Transaction Manager

Pantheon uses a Private Transaction Manager to implement privacy. For example, Orion.
Each Pantheon node that sends or receives private transactions requires an associated Orion node.

Orion Nodes

Private transactions are passed from the Pantheon node to the associated Orion node. The Orion node encrypts and directly distributes (that is, point to point) the private transaction to Orion nodes participating in the transaction. Private Transaction Managers are also known as Enclaves.

Private Transaction Attributes

Private transactions have additional attributes to public Ethereum transactions:

Pantheon implements restricted private transactions only.

Pantheon and Orion Keys

Pantheon and Orion nodes both have public/private key pairs identifying them. The private transaction submitted from the Pantheon node to the Orion node is signed with the Pantheon node private key. The privateFrom and privateFor attributes specified in the RLP-encoded transaction string for eea_sendRawTransaction are the public keys of the Orion nodes sending and receiving the transaction.

The mapping of Pantheon node addresses to Orion node public keys is off-chain. That is, the sender of a private transaction must know the Orion node public key of the recipient.

Privacy Groups

The group of nodes specified by privateFrom and privateFor form a privacy group and are given a unique privacy group ID by Orion. The private transaction is stored in Orion with the privacy group ID.

The Pantheon nodes maintain the public world state for the blockchain and a private state for each privacy group. The private states contain data that is not shared in the globally replicated world state. Private transactions read and write to the private world state for the privacy group, and read from the public world state.

Privacy Groups

The Orion nodes are not shown above for clarity only. To send private transactions, each Pantheon node must have an associated Orion node.

The above illustrates two privacy groups enabling: 

* A, B, and C to send transactions that are private from D 
* A, C, and D to send transactions that are private from B

To send private transactions between A, B, and C, A initialises a contract in a private transaction with
B and C specified as the `privateFor` and A specified as the `privateFrom`. Initialising the contract 
creates a privacy group consisting of A, B, and C. For the ABC private state to remain consistent, 
A, B, and C must be included on transactions (as either `privateFrom` or `privateFor`) even if they are 
between two of the three parties.

To send private transactions between A, C, and D, C initialises a different contract in a private transaction with
A and D specified as the `privateFor` and C specified as the `privateFrom`. Initialising the contract 
creates a privacy group consisting of  A, C, and D. For the ACD private state to remain consistent, 
A, C, and D must be included on transactions (as either `privateFrom` or `privateFor`) even if they are 
between two of the three parties.

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