Blockchains beyond Digital Currencies: Privacy-Oriented Implementations of Industrial Architectures

Abstract

Blockchain applicability has evolved beyond the cryptocurrency landscape over the past decade. The next generation Internet demands that different industrial applications are built on top of strong data privacy requirements. This doctoral dissertation studies the applicability of data privacy in blockchains and distributed ledgers through architecting and deploying dissimilar industry use cases. The enabling of privacy-oriented implementations over common industrial needs that concern user identification, copyright management, and cloud computing, enhances the ways data privacy is applied in each use case individually with regards to corresponding blockchain qualities. Particularly, in terms of user identification processes, a decentralized architecture with Know Your Customer processes preserving data privacy is implemented and analyzed throughout this work. Regarding copyrights management, the dissertation studies a related deployed implementation of consortium blockchain smart contracts on music industry rights management, while the latest presented use case of cloud computing proposes an unbiased Service Level Agreements assessment procedure leveraging smart contract isolation. Data privacy elaboration respects each of the aforementioned industrial architectures defining particular blockchain privacy layers. Conclusively, the dissertation discusses individually each use case's outcomes and future dimensions, and deduces a holistic architectural paradigm blockchain stack that envisions privacy applicability in next generation Internet.