Hi all,
Happy to launch private.zecblock.com, a version of ZecBlock where the server doesn’t learn what you look up.
ZecBlock Private uses PIR (Private Information Retrieval).
How it works
- Your browser encrypts the search before sending it. The transaction ID, block or address never leaves your device in readable form.
- The server works through the whole dataset to answer, without knowing which record you asked for.
- It sends back one encrypted answer, and only your browser can decrypt it.
- A search for something that exists looks the same as a search for something that doesn’t.
As far as we know, it’s the first full block explorer (transactions, blocks and addresses) built on PIR. Previous PIR explorer demos covered narrower lookups, such as address balances.
Check it yourself
Open your browser’s developer tools (Inspect → Network) and search for something. Every request of the same kind is the same size, and none of them contains what you typed. After each search, the site also shows a short summary of exactly what your browser sent.
Details
- Data stays close to the chain tip: new blocks are published every few seconds, typically within about 20 seconds of the regular explorer.
- Each data publication is signed, and your browser checks every result against it.
- Searches are heavier than on a normal explorer, around 1.2 MB uploaded for a transaction lookup and 0.4 MB for an address lookup. That’s the cost of the server not knowing what you asked for.
