Updated 2019-09-30

Private Transactions

Private transactions have additional attributes to public Ethereum transactions:

• privateFrom - Orion public key of transaction sender

• privateFor - Orion public keys of transaction recipients or privacyGroupId - Privacy group to receive transaction

• restriction - Private transactions are restricted or unrestricted:

  • In restricted private transactions the payload of the private transaction is received and stored only by the nodes participating in the transaction.

  • In unrestricted private transactions the payload of the private transaction is transmitted to all nodes in the network but is readable only by nodes participating in the transaction.

  Important

  Besu implements restricted private transactions only.

For details on creating and sending private transactions, refer to our How To documentation.

Besu and Orion Keys

Besu and Orion nodes both have public/private key pairs identifying them. The private transaction submitted from the Besu node to the Orion node is signed with the Besu node private key. The privateFrom and privateFor attributes specified in the RLP-encoded transaction string for eea_sendRawTransaction are the public keys of the Orion nodes sending and receiving the transaction.

Important

The mapping of Besu node addresses to Orion node public keys is off-chain. That is, the sender of a private transaction must know the Orion node public key of the recipient.