Review on privacy threats and protection mechanisms for blockchain technology

As a new distributed computing paradigm for building trusted networks and realizing value interconnection, blockchain drives a new round of technological change and application innovation in traditional industries with its features of decentralization, access controllability and anonymity. However, there is still a serious threat of privacy breaches. By sorting out the research results related to blockchain privacy in recent years, the privacy threats faced by the blockchain were compared and assessed, such as account privacy, transaction privacy and communication privacy, and the currency mixing mechanism, information hiding mechanism and channel isolation mechanism in the blockchain were analyzed from the perspective of privacy protection mechanism. The blockchain had good application prospects in privacy protection, but the privacy threats indicated that there was still room for improvement in blockchain privacy protection technology. The future development of blockchain privacy protection was prospected from four perspectives, and it provided ideas and references for the continuous exploration and in-depth research of blockchain privacy protection technology. © 2023 CIMS. All rights reserved.