{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,1]],"date-time":"2025-11-01T13:55:45Z","timestamp":1762005345753,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":28,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"12","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,9]],"date-time":"2021-12-09T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1639008000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"the National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["61802111","61972215","61972073"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["61802111","61972215","61972073"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"the National Key R&amp;D Program of China","award":["2018YFA0704703"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2018YFA0704703"]}]},{"name":"the Basic Research Plan of Key Scientific Research Projects in Colleges and  Universities of Henan Province","award":["22A413004"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["22A413004"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>In response to the rapid growth of credit-investigation data, data redundancy among credit-investigation agencies, privacy leakages of credit-investigation data subjects, and data security risks have been reported. This study proposes a privacy-protection scheme for a credit-investigation system based on blockchain technology, which realizes the secure sharing of credit-investigation data among multiple entities such as credit-investigation users, credit-investigation agencies, and cloud service providers. This scheme is based on blockchain technology to solve the problem of islanding of credit-investigation data and is based on zero-knowledge-proof technology, which works by submitting a proof to the smart contract to achieve anonymous identity authentication, ensuring that the identity privacy of credit-investigation users is not disclosed; this scheme is also based on searchable-symmetric-encryption technology to realize the retrieval of the ciphertext of the credit-investigation data. A security analysis showed that this scheme guarantees the confidentiality, the availability, the tamper-proofability, and the ciphertext searchability of credit-investigation data, as well as the fairness and anonymity of identity authentication in the credit-investigation data query. An efficiency analysis showed that, compared with similar identity-authentication schemes, the proof key of this scheme is smaller, and the verification time is shorter. Compared with similar ciphertext-retrieval schemes, the time for this scheme to generate indexes and trapdoors and return search results is significantly shorter.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e23121657","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,9]],"date-time":"2021-12-09T21:46:58Z","timestamp":1639086418000},"page":"1657","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":11,"title":["Privacy-Protection Scheme of a Credit-Investigation System Based on Blockchain"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"23","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-9388-5690","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ke","family":"Yuan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer and Information Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China"},{"name":"Henan Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Processing, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2698-4856","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yingjie","family":"Yan","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer and Information Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6235-4678","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Tong","family":"Xiao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer and Information Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0860-6547","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Wenchao","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer and Information Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-4414-317X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sufang","family":"Zhou","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computer and Information Engineering, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China"},{"name":"Henan Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Processing, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5588-9690","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Chunfu","family":"Jia","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"College of Cybersecurity, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,12,9]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Liu, C.Y., and Hou, C.C. 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