A Comparative Analysis of Blockchain Redaction Techniques

With the widespread use of blockchain, scenarios requiring data modification or privacy control pose challenges to traditional immutable structures. Redactable blockchains offer a potential solution, but the performance implications of various techniques remain understudied. No prior work has provided a framework to assess the performance of these systems. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting a comparative benchmark of redaction techniques for blockchain. The analysis focuses on chameleon hash-based, mutation-based, and votingbased approaches and offers a nuanced evaluation of the efficiency, security, and scalability trade-offs involved in these methods. Our empirical findings demonstrate that chameleon hash-based techniques are superior in terms of redaction speed, particularly within permissioned blockchain environments. Conversely, voting-based techniques excel in decentralization at the expense of latency. Mutation-based techniques, despite being straightforward, induces high storage overhead exceeding baseline blockchains by several factors. Through analytical and experimental examination of key performance indicators and potential vulnerabilities, this paper provides insights for selecting the optimal approach based on application-specific requirements.