BCPPT: A blockchain-based privacy-preserving and traceability identity management scheme for intellectual property

Currently, more and more intellectual property (IP) applications, including blockchain-based platforms, are presented to protect personal intellectual achievement. However, these applications are independent of each other, and the user’s identity information is controlled by an organization, which may not only reveal the user’s identity information due to the single point of failure, but also add extra communication overhead when the user accesses other applications. Additionally, current research focuses on the user’s control over their information, while the IP field requires tracing the user’s identity information in the event of IP dispute. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based privacy-preserving and traceability identity management scheme for IP, where the user’s identity information is private and traceable. Our proposed scheme lets users generate their identity (ID) and corresponding public keys and private keys. Key pairs are used for authentication when accessing the services. We use blockchain to record ID and public key of the legitimate user, and adopt improved-Shamir secret sharing to achieve privacy-preserving and traceability of real identity information and reduce storage overhead. Experimental results confirm that our proposed scheme can protect user’s privacy and effectively reduce storage and computation overhead.