South Korea issues first blockchain guidelines for personal data protection

South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) has established its first guidelines on handling personal information for blockchain-based services, Yonhap News reported. The need for the guidelines reportedly arose during the commission's recent review of a case involving the South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb's violation of rules on transferring personal data abroad. The PIPC advised against recording personally identifiable information, such as resident registration numbers, on-chain. It also stated that off-chain personal data corresponding to on-chain information must be protected through security measures like encryption. This is because combining on-chain and off-chain data could potentially allow for the tracking of transaction histories, even if on-chain data alone is not identifiable. Lee Jae-hyung, Director of the Investigation and Coordination Bureau at the PIPC, said that if random numbers used in the digital signature process are repeated, attackers could analyze patterns in the output to deduce and steal private keys. He stressed the importance of not reusing these random numbers, noting that such cases have occurred in the past.