Updated on April 15, 2020

Privacy

In Besu, privacy refers to the ability to keep transactions private between the involved participants. Other participants cannot access the transaction content or list of participants.

Important

For production environments requiring private transactions:

• We recommend using a network with a consensus mechanism supporting transaction finality. For example, IBFT 2.0.
• Orion must be highly available and run in a separate instance to Besu.

Using private transactions with pruning or fast sync is not supported.

Private transaction manager

Besu uses a private transaction manager, Orion, to implement privacy. Each Besu node sending or receiving private transactions requires an associated Orion node.

Private transactions pass from the Besu node to the associated Orion node. The Orion node encrypts and directly distributes (that is, point-to-point) the private transaction to the Orion nodes participating in the transaction.

By default, each participant in a privacy network uses its own Besu and Orion node. Multi-tenancy allows more than one participant to use the same Besu and Orion node.

Tip

Private Transaction Managers are also known as Enclaves.

Reorg-compatible privacy

In v1.4, using private transactions in a network using a consensus mechanism where forks occur (that is, PoW algorithms or Clique) is an early access feature. For example, using private transactions on Ropsten.

Do not use private transactions in production environments using consensus mechanisms where forks occur.