The privacy protection mechanism of Hyperledger Fabric and its application in supply chain finance

Abstract

Blockchain technology ensures that data is tamper-proof, traceable, and trustworthy. This article introduces a well-known blockchain technology implementation—Hyperledger Fabric. The basic framework and privacy protection mechanisms of Hyperledger Fabric such as certificate authority, channel, Private Data Collection, etc. are described. As an example, a specific business scenario of supply chain finance is figured out. And accordingly, some design details about how to apply these privacy protection mechanisms are described.

Full text

R E S E A R C H Open Access
The privacy protection mechanism of
Hyperledger Fabric and its application in
supply chain finance
Chaoqun Ma, Xiaolin Kong, Qiujun Lan
*
and Zhongding Zhou
Abstract
Blockchain technology ensures that data is tamper-proof, traceable, and trustworthy. This article introduces a well-
known blockchain technology implementation—Hyperledger Fabric. The basic framework and privacy protection
mechanisms of Hyperledger Fabric such as certificate authority, channel, Private Data Collection, etc. are described.
As an example, a specific business scenario of supply chain finance is figured out. And accordingly, some design
details about how to apply these privacy protection mechanisms are described.
Keywords: Privacy protection, Supply chain finance, Hyperledger Fabric
Introduction
China’s small and middle enterprises (SMEs) account for
99% of the total number of enterprises, and provide
more than 80% jobs, which is an important part of the
national economy. However, due to the lack of sufficient
collateral and the opaque information, it is difficult to
obtain financial support from financial institutions. The
problem of financing difficulties is a huge obstacle to the
development of small and micro enterprises (Jiang et al.
2014; Wang 2016). Moreover, SMEs are often in a weak
position in the product supply chain. Accounts receiv-
able and advance prepayments occupy most of the
liquidity of these enterprises, which undoubtedly would
exacerbate their financial strain, increase the risk of
capital chain broken, affect their normal operations and
greatly reduce their production efficiency (Yao and Liu
2018; Zhu et al. 2016). Supply chain finance service takes
the real trade background as the premise and relies on a
core enterprise which effectively integrate the capital
flow into the supply chain management process
(Gelsomino et al. 2016; Lekkakos and Serrano 2016).
Supply chain finance as a new way to solve the financing
problems of SMEs would revitalize massive “dead”assets
such as accounts receivable, prepayments and inventory
warehouse receipts. According to the National Bureau of
Statistics at the end of 2016, the net amount of accounts
receivable of industrial enterprises in China was 12.68
trillion yuan. However, according to China’s commercial
factoring industry development report, the size of
China’s commercial factoring markets in 2015 was only
about 200 billion yuan, and a large number of “dead”
assets were still not fully revitalized. The credibility of
commercial bills, core enterprises and supply chain
platforms is a key obstacle.
Blockchain technology is a rapidly developing and
influential innovation technology. It is an ever-increasing
distribute database (DDB), also known as a distributed
ledger (Pilkington 2016; Iansiti and Lakhani 2017). The
DDB need multiple entities to participate and maintain.
Different from traditional bookkeeping technology, it
bundles a series of trading records into blocks, which
connected and encrypted by cryptographic methods.
The Hash value, timestamp, delivery data and other
information of the previous block are embedded into the
latter block. The participants in the blockchain maintain
a growing long chain collectively. What they can do is
only adding new records but tampering with records
that have occurred. They can reach a consensus without
central control. Meanwhile, they use cryptographic
mechanism to ensure that transactions cannot be dis-
avowed and tampered, and to protect the privacy of data
and records as much as possible (Cachin 2016; Belle
2017). Because of its decentralized, traceable, irrevocable
* Correspondence: lanqiujun@hnu.edu.cn
Business School, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China
C
y
bersecurit
y
© The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
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Ma et al. Cybersecurity (2019) 2:5
https://doi.org/10.1186/s42400-019-0022-2

and tampering nature, blockchain is expected to be the
cornerstone of the trust economy in the future.
Many countries attach grant importance to the devel-
opment of blockchain. For example, in May 2018, Xi
Jinping, the president of China, clearly stated that “new
generation of information technology represented by
artificial intelligence, quantum information, mobile com-
munications, Internet of Things, and blockchain acceler-
ates breakthrough applications.”In July 2018, the
Firecoin Group, one of the world’s largest cryptocur-
rency exchanges, launched a “blockchain+industry alli-
ance”to upgrade and transform real economy projects
through blockchain technology, and to promote the
blockchain in the physical industry. Blockchain technol-
ogy and the cryptocurrency economy help companies to
effectively solve problems encountered in the actual
development process. In this background, “blockchain
+supply chain finance”is highly valued. For example, in
2018, Ping An Group and China Foton Motor Group
use the blockchain technology and electronic signatures
to improve the financing efficiency of the enterprises.
China Tencent Company uses the accounts receivable
from the core enterprises as the underlying assets to
realize the circulation of the credit certificates through
the blockchain. In addition, Huawei, UF, Yixin, Bubi and
other well-known Chinese companies have also put
forward the “blockchain + supply chain finance”solu-
tion, achieving the weak centralization of supply chain
finance, data traceable, anti-tampering.
The blockchain technology makes the transaction data
credible and shareable, however, it also increases the risk
of disclosing the business privacy of the enterprise.
Actually, the company does not want competitors to
know such information as price, cost, etc., therefore,
how to effectively protect various types of data in the
blockchain network system is a crucial problem. On the
one hand, SMEs need supply chain financial services to
solve the problem of financing difficulties and high
financing costs. Blockchain technology can make trans-
action data irreversible, traceable, and reduce credit risk.
On the other hand, supply chain financial service
providers often need the business information of SMEs
when they conduct credit evaluation on SMEs based on
blockchain technology. At the same time, the informa-
tion of each enterprise in the blockchain needs to be
shared, In this process, the privacy of SMEs needs to be
protected, we need an algorithm to protect privacy. Data
sharing is not implemented in the traditional supply
chain process. Therefore, the privacy protection require-
ments are different from those in the supply chain based
on blockchain. In the traditional supply chain business
process, some methods are used to protect privacy, such
as the combination secure multiparty computation
cryptography methods with risk identification algorithms
from social network analysis, differential privacy, bidirec-
tional efficiency-privacy transferable authentication
protocol, public-key cryptography, symmetric encryp-
tion, message authentication codes, randomized read
access control, etc. The advantages of these methods in-
clude strengthening risk identification for the supply
chain network, authenticating a batch of tags with less
privacy guarantees, reducing trust issues between supply
chain owners and tag manufacturers, reducing computa-
tional and communication overhead, and reducing com-
putational effort. However, these passive privacy
protection methods cannot completely solve the privacy
protection based on transaction information sharing
(Zare-Garizy et al. 2018; Yao et al. 2016; Qi et al. 2012;
Arbit et al. 2014; Lee and Park 2013; Gao et al. 2004).
Hyperledger Fabric is a well-known blockchain technol-
ogy implementation. This paper describes the privacy
protection mechanism and their applications in supply
chain finance scenarios.
About Hyperledger Fabric
In December 2015, the Linux Foundation and 30 initial
companies set up a Hyperledger project to promote
cross-industry blockchain technology and provide open
source reference implementations for transparent, open,
decentralized enterprise-level distributed ledger technol-
ogy. Hyperledger Fabric has promoted the development
of related protocols, specifications and standards of
blockchain and distributed ledger. Fabric is one of the
first programs added to Hyperledger, it was presented by
IBM, DAH and other enterprises by the end of 2015, the
positioning of the program is business-oriented distrib-
uted ledger platform. Hyperledger Fabric introduced
rights management, and its design supports pluggable
and expandable. It is the first open source project for
the league chain. By August 2018, the Hyperledger has
more than 250 members, including Intel, Accenture,
Huawei, JD, and other well-known enterprises. Since the
fabric 1.2 version already provides a mature and stable
privacy protection mechanism, the subsequent solutions
in this article are based on this version.
Hyperledger Fabric has a high degree of extensibility
and flexibility as it is designed with a modular architec-
ture. From an application perspective, Hyperledger
Fabric is divided into four components of identity man-
agement, ledger management, transaction management,
and smart contracts; from the bottom-up point of view,
Hyperledger Fabric is divided into four components of
member management, consensus services, chain code
services, security and cryptographic services. Security is
an enterprise-level blockchain concern, requiring the
support of the underlying cryptography. The logical
architecture of the Hyperledger fabric is shown in the
Fig. 1.
Ma et al. Cybersecurity (2019) 2:5 Page 2 of 9

Blockchain network is a typical peer-to-peer network,
the peers are directly connected. Organization is the
main body of the blockchain network, which includes
the corresponding client application, network peer and
certificate. The network peer has three categories, the
main peer, the endorsement peer and the accounting
peer and the sorting service peer should also be included
in the network. After a transaction occurs between the
network peers, the client application submits the trans-
action proposal to the endorsement peer, the endorse-
ment peer simulates the execution of the proposal and
endorses it, and returns the simulation execution result
to the client application; the client application submits a
transaction that contains the signature endorsement and
the execution result of the simulation transaction to the
sorting service peer, the sorting service peer sorts the
transactions and generates chunks, and broadcasts the
chunks to the master peer, the master peer saves the
chunks to the ledger, the peers in the blockchain
network except the sorting peer are synchronized
according to the master peer. The specific transaction
process is shown in Fig. 2.
The privacy security mechanism of Hyperledger
Fabric
The privacy protection measures of Hyperledger Fabric
include the following four aspects: Firstly, asymmetric
cryptography and zero-knowledge proof separate the
transaction data from on-chain records, protecting
privacy from the underlying algorithm. Secondly, the
digital certificate management service guarantees the le-
gitimacy of the organization on the blockchain. Thirdly,
the design of multi-channel separates the information
between different channels. Finally, privacy data collec-
tion further satisfies the need for the isolation of privacy
data between different organizations within the same
channel.
In the above measures, the two most distinctive
methods are the channel and privacy data collection.
The channel is dedicated to the blockchain privacy pro-
tection, allowing the data on the channel to be isolated
separately. The peer on the same channel shares a
ledger, the transaction peer needs to obtain the recogni-
tion of the channel before it can join the channel and
transact with others. The PDC (private data collection)
is a collection of organizations that are authorized to
store private data on a channel, and the data stored in-
cludes: (1) Private data, which implements peer-to-peer
communication between authorized organizations
through the Gossip protocol. The privacy data is stored
in the peer’s private database. (2) The hash value of
private data. For private data, the peers on the channel
use the hash value of the private data when sorting and
writing the endorsement, as evidence of the existence of
the transaction and for state validation and auditing.
For the processing of privacy data, the Hyperledger
Fabric is divided into the following two scenarios: new
channels are needed when the entire transaction and
ledger must be kept strictly confidential to the outside
members of the channel; when the transaction informa-
tion and ledger need to be shared among some organiza-
tions, some of them will be able to see all the
transaction data, other organizations need to know the
occurrence of this transaction to verify the authenticity
of the transaction, a private data collection should be
established in this case. In addition, because private data
is propagated through peer-to-peer rather than block,
the privacy data collection is used when the transaction
data must be confidential for the sorting service peer.
The blockchain transaction process involving the privacy
Fig. 1 System logical architecture diagram of Hyperledger Fabric (Zhang et al. 2018)
Ma et al. Cybersecurity (2019) 2:5 Page 3 of 9

data collection is as follows (Hyperledger 2018). Accord-
ingly, Fig. 3shows this process.
1. The client application submits the offer request to
call the chain code function to the endorsement
peer of the private data set authorization, and the
private data is sent through the provisional domain
in the offer.
2. The endorsement peer simulates the transaction
and stores the private data in a local temporary
repository in the peer. The endorsement peer
disseminates the private data to the authorized peer
via the gossip protocol.
3. The endorsement peer returns the public data,
including the hash value of the private data key-
value pair, to the client.
4. The client application submits the transaction to
the sorting service peer, and the sorting result is
distributed to each block. These blocks containing
hash values are distributed to all peers. Each peer
above the channel can use the hash of the private
data to verify the transaction without knowing the
exact private data.
5. When submitting a block, the authorized peer can
use the collection policy to determine if it is
authorized to view private data. The authorization
peer will check the local temporary data store firstly
to determine if it has received private data when
the chaincode is endorsed. If not, they will attempt
to obtain private data from other peers. It then
verifies that the hash of the private data and the
hash in the block’s public information are
consistent and commits the transaction and the
block. Once authenticated or submitted, the privacy
data will be transferred to a copy of the privacy
state database and the privacy write repository.
Privacy data will be removed from the temporary
data store.
When a member of a private data collection shares
private data with other organizations, such as when a
member of the collection has a dispute or if they want
to transfer the asset to a third party. The third party can
calculate the hash of the private data and check that the
hash value is consistent with the hash on the channel
ledger, thus proving the existence of the transaction.
For very private data, after a period of time, the
organization that shares the data hopes or requests for
timely removal of the data store for policy reasons, leav-
ing only the hash of the data as evidence that the trans-
action cannot be tampered with. In some cases, private
data needs to be stored in the peer’s privacy database
until it can be replicated to a database outside of the
blockchain. This data needs to be stored in the peer
until the chaincode business process is used. To support
subsequent transactions, once a certain number of
subsequent blocks are added to the private database, the
previous private data can be purged.
In addition, the Hyperledger Fabric protects privacy
data including: within a channel, you can restrict the in-
put data of a chain code to a collection of endorsements,
and by using a visual data set, this visibility setting will
Fig. 2 Schematic diagram of the Hyperledger Fabric trading process (Zang et al. 2018)
Ma et al. Cybersecurity (2019) 2:5 Page 4 of 9

determine whether the input and output chain code data
is included in the submission transaction, not just the
output data; hashes and encrypts the data before calling
the chain code. If the data is hashed, you need to pro-
vide a way to share the data source, and if you encrypt
the data, you need to provide a way to share the decryp-
tion key. By building access control in chain code logic,
you can restrict data access to certain roles in your
organization; the still encrypted data can be encrypted
by the file encryption system on the peer and the data in
the transmission is encrypted by TLS.
Applications in supply chain finance
Business scenarios of supply chain finance
Supply chain refers to the core enterprises, starting from
the supporting parts, making intermediate products and
final products, and finally sending the products to the
consumers by the sales network, connecting the sup-
pliers, manufacturers, distributors and end users into
one whole functional network chain structure. Supply
chain finance is a typical scenario of multi-subject
participation, asymmetric information, imperfect credit
mechanism and non-standard scene of credit standards,
Fig. 3 Hyperledger fabric privacy protection flow
Fig. 4 Supply chain financial business process classification (WelinkData 2017)
Ma et al. Cybersecurity (2019) 2:5 Page 5 of 9

and has a natural fit with blockchain technology. The
use of blockchain technology to solve the pain in the
supply chain financial industry has attracted people’s
attention. A typical supply chain financial scenario is
shown below (Fig. 4).
In the upstream segment of the supply chain, the
supplier relies on the transaction relationship with the
core enterprise to obtain the credit support, including
contract orders and accounts receivable, etc. In the core
enterprise interval, logistics finance mainly relies on the
credit of the material itself. The credit of the material
relates to standardization, fluidity, pledge and salvage
value, etc. Therefore, the pledge is the warehouse storage
and futures generated in the circulation of bulk com-
modities. In the downstream section of the supply chain,
it includes financial products such as credit loan, receiv-
ables pledge and so on. Most of the financial product
design in the supply chain needs the documents, trans-
action records, credit status and other information of the
enterprises in the chain. Through the blockchain technol-
ogy, once the transaction is formed, the relevant data to
achieve the distributed storage, which can be traced and
verified, so as to alleviate the core enterprise is difficult to
self-certification innocence, small and medium-sized en-
terprises financing difficult financing problems.
Take the example of order financing in the upstream
of the supply chain. Manufacturing companies purchase
raw materials from upstream raw material suppliers by
purchasing and selling contracts with downstream core
companies. Manufacturing companies borrow from
financial institutions to pay for raw materials, and their
finished and semi-finished products are monitored in
third-party logistics. Sales revenue to repay bank principal
and interest. However, in the actual production and oper-
ation activities, the upstream manufacturing companies
are far away from the core enterprises in the production
process, and it is difficult to obtain commercial papers dir-
ectly related to the core enterprises. A commercial paper
that has not been endorsed by a core enterprise will have
the problem of financing difficulties, and the blockchain
can solve this problem. Nontamperable and traceable fea-
tures of data reduce billing costs and reduce financing
costs. The financing of financial institutions by means of
orders requires the manufacturing companies to provide
transaction data, but because of the competitive relation-
ship between manufacturing companies, there is a need for
transaction privacy protection. On the one hand, the trans-
action price between competitors needs to be kept secret;
on the other hand, the trading behavior of special indus-
tries requires privacy protection, such as military units.
In order to describe the applications of the privacy
protection mechanism of Hyperledger in supply chain
finance. As an example, Fig. 5shows a specific supply
chain finance scenario. There is a core enterprise, three
SMEs (small or middle enterprise), two financial institu-
tions and government departments in the product
supply chain. Suppose there are two business processes,
the government sector (O1), the core enterprise (O2),
the financial institution A (O3), the SME A (O4) and the
SME B (O5) belong to the first business process (The
information propagation path is indicated by a solid line
in Fig. 5); government departments (O1), core compan-
ies (O2), financial institutions B (O6), SME A (O4) and
SME C (O7) belong to the second business process (Its
Fig. 5 Supply chain finance business scenario
Ma et al. Cybersecurity (2019) 2:5 Page 6 of 9

information propagation path is indicated by a dotted
line in the Fig. 5. Two business processes involve the
transaction of information between SME A and the core
enterprise.
In supply chain finance, due to the long business
process and many organizations involved, the following
requirements must be met for privacy protection. The
business scenario is described as follows: All the above
organizations have entered the blockchain network.
There are two business processes. In the first business
process, transactions occur SME B and SME A, other
transactions occur between SME A and the core enter-
prise. The SME B participating in the transaction did
not receive the advance payment after receiving the
production order of SME A, and SME A did not receive
the advance payment from the core enterprise. SME A
and SME B hope to finance through relevant bills, obtain
production funds from financial institution A, purchase
raw materials for production。In the second business
process, SME C also deals with SME A., SME B and
SME C are suppliers of SME A, and there is a competi-
tive relationship between SME B and SME C. SME A
and the core enterprise generate transactions, and finan-
cial institution B provides financing services for the
second business process. Government management is
responsible for collecting relevant data on a regular basis
and exercising statistical and supervisory duties. In
summary, the following privacy protection requirements
exist in these organizations on the blockchain:
(1) Data transmission is safe and reliable
(2) SME B does not want any transaction behavior
between itself and SME A to be known by SME C.
(3) SME B does not want transaction data related to
privacy to be passed to financial institution A and
government management department in the
business process, and hopes to obtain the
prepayment of financial institution A by virtue of
the provided non-private transaction data, the fi-
nancial institution needs to obtain relevant Transac-
tion data to determine the authenticity of the
transaction and the risk of lending, the government
management agencies hope to obtain relevant trans-
action data in order to grasp the economy.
(4) The core confidential information of each unit
needs to be completely confidential.
Privacy protection design of supply chain finance
In response to the above privacy protection require-
ments, the financial privacy protection design of the
supply chain based on Hyperledger Fabric is as follows:
(1) All organizations joining the blockchain must be
authenticated at the CA to prevent illegal
organizations from joining the network to steal user
privacy. The viewing rights of the private data can
be further subdivided. In the scenario of the league
chain served by the Hyperledger, many
organizational relationships on the channel are
complex. Therefore, privacy data of different
degrees of encryption can be given with different
levels according to the nature of the transaction
activity and the socio-economic relationship be-
tween the organizations. For example, organizations
that directly participate in transactions can obtain
fully transparent privacy data. Upstream and down-
stream companies associated with this transaction
can obtain private data that is added with less noise.
Organizations and industry associations that have
little to do with the transaction can obtain statistics
on transactions. However, competitors may not be
able to have fully access the relevant data of this
transaction.
(2) Establish different channels for different business
processes. In this case, the two business processes
form two channels to ensure complete separation of
information between SME C and SME B. Based on
the channel formed by the first business process,
establish a private data set including SME B and
SME A, and a private data set including SME A and
core enterprise, and also in the second business
process. Establishing similar collections of private
data to ensure that private data is only disseminated
to both parties to the transaction. Other data is
provided to financial institutions for risk assessment
and provided to government managements for
statistical and regulatory purposes.
(3) For the core confidential information within each
organization, the organization performs asymmetric
encryption and transmits hash of data to the
blockchain. This approach should also be part of
the Hyperledger Fabric’s privacy protection
mechanism. In addition, the storage model for
private data should be further designed. At present,
Hyperledger’s storage of private data is stored in the
privacy database of the peer. Once the private data
is copied to the database outside the chain, the
linked database data will be deleted, leaving only the
hash value of the private data to prove the existence
of the transaction. However, this approach makes it
impossible to fully exploit the traceability of the
blockchain, and the final traceability is only the
hash of the transaction data, which cannot be
verified on the chain. Therefore, the local database
should also establish a corresponding hash value of
the privacy transaction data and implement
mapping with the privacy database on the chain to
achieve traceability based on the same hash value.
Ma et al. Cybersecurity (2019) 2:5 Page 7 of 9

(4) The data can be further encrypted according to the
attributes of different login users after the privacy
data is stored in the database of the organization.
Even if the same client of the same organization,
the person who manipulates it may be different, so
it is necessary to encrypt the data to different
degrees according to the attributes of the login user.
For example, a supervisor in an organization has
the right to view all of the data in the peer
database, and visitors in the organization can only
see the encrypted data. The permissions of different
peers in the same organization to view data should
also be different. This is an improvement direction
of the privacy protection design on Hyperledger
Fabric
The transaction data is divided into two parts, one
part is non-confidential transaction information, the
other part is the confidential data information, which
belongs to privacy data. Organizations with direct pro-
duction activities on the business process can form a
collection of private data that can be authorized to view
private data, while organizations that do not belong to
the private data collection on the channel cannot see the
private data and can only view the hash value of the
private data. A peer authorized to obtain private data
can compare the hash value of the private data calcula-
tion with the public hash value to verify the authenticity
of the transaction. Based on this, the privacy data
protection mechanism of the Hyperledger Fabric pro-
tects the private information in the supply chain. The
privacy data collection design of SME A and SME B
isshowninFig.6.
Compared with the traditional accounting method,
the blockchain-based accounting method realizes the
distributed storage of the ledger. Each peer stores the
same ledger locally, so that the ledger is authenticated
by multiple parties. It is difficult to be tampered with the
ledger. Therefore, this way achieves decentralization.
Hyperledger Fabric achieves the isolation of private data
through the method of private data collection and
channel. While the traditional accounting method pro-
tects the privacy by setting the login password, which has
security risks, and the data is not authenticated by mul-
tiple parties. The ledger is not necessarily true.
Correspondingly, Table 1lists the differences between
blockchain-based accounting method and traditional
ledgers.
Fig. 6 PDC design in the supply chain finance scenario
Table 1 Differences Between Blockchain-Based Accounting Method and Traditional Ledgers
Blockchain-Based Accounting Method Traditional Ledgers
Decentralized; Distributed storage, each peer has the same ledger Centralized; Each participant only saves its own ledgers
Traceable, each transaction is recorded Untraceable, whether the transaction is recorded or not
is determined by the participant
Transaction records cannot be tampered after multiple verifications Each participant is able to modify their own ledgers
Channel and Privacy Data Collections in Hyperledger fabric are
designed to protect data privacy
Protecting user’s privacy with a login password
Data sharing and privacy protection are both implemented Data sharing is not implemented
Ma et al. Cybersecurity (2019) 2:5 Page 8 of 9

Conclusion
The blockchain has a relatively short development his-
tory, it was only used as a technology to support digital
currency bitcoin in the very beginning. At present,
blockchain technology has been separated from Bitcoin,
and has been applied in many fields such as finance,
trade, credit, Internet of things and shared economy. In
the face of complex scenarios such as the privacy protec-
tion challenges of the supply chain financial business
scenario, Hyperledger Fabric offers a range of solutions.
Flexible combination of these privacy protection mecha-
nisms can meet various privacy security needs.
Supply chain finance involves different participants, with
a wide variety of scenarios and complex business pro-
cesses. This article mainly introduces the privacy protec-
tion mechanism of the Hyperledger Fabric, and uses a
supply chain financial case to explain. Our next work will
be to analyze the specific privacy protection needs of
different supply chain financial business scenarios, and
improve the privacy protection mechanism of the Hyperl-
edger Fabric, such as setting the viewing permission of
hierarchical subdivision, improving the privacy data
storage mode, etc.
Abbreviations
CA: Certificate authority; DDB: Distribute database; PDC: Private data
collection; SME: Small or middle enterprise; TLS: Transport layer security
Acknowledgements
The authors are indebted to Mr. Wenxuan Long, the Hyperledger China’s
Community Development Manager, for providing documents on the
Hyperledger, and express our gratitude to Dr. Haijie Peng, the engineer of
Chuangfa Science & Technology Co., who gave some suggestions on the
manuscript.
Funding
This research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China
(71871090; 71850012) and Hunan Provincial Science & Technology Major
Project (2018GK1020).
Availability of data and materials
The authors are indebted to Mr. Wenxuan Long, the Hyperledger China’s
Community Development Manager, for providing documents on the
Hyperledger, and express our gratitude to Dr. Haijie Peng, the engineer of
CCS TransFar technology Co, who gave some suggestions on the manuscript.
Authors’contributions
MC, LQ and ZZ conceived and designed the study, KX collected materials,
carried out drawing and writing, MC and ZZ reviewed the manuscript, LQ
edited the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Publisher’sNote
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional affiliations.
Received: 26 October 2018 Accepted: 15 January 2019
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