Qanaat: A Scalable Multi-Enterprise Permissioned Blockchain System with Confidentiality Guarantees

Abstract

Today's large-scale data management systems need to address distributed applications' confidentiality and scalability requirements among a set of collaborative enterprises. This paper presents Qanaat, a scalable multi-enterprise permissioned blockchain system that guarantees the confidentiality of enterprises in collaboration workflows. Qanaat presents data collections that enable any subset of enterprises involved in a collaboration workflow to keep their collaboration private from other enterprises. A transaction ordering scheme is also presented to enforce only the necessary and sufficient constraints on transaction order to guarantee data consistency. Furthermore, Qanaat supports data consistency across collaboration workflows where an enterprise can participate in different collaboration workflows with different sets of enterprises. Finally, Qanaat presents a suite of consensus protocols to support intra-shard and cross-shard transactions within or across enterprises.