Can you control a nodes activity visibility?

Question

The problem:
Say I have 3 companies with their own nodes, node1, node2 and node3. Both node2 and node3 are different competing customers working for node1. The interactivity between these nodes needs to be confidential because node2 and node3 are competing with each other.

I can quite easily hide the data that node2 and node3 send to node1 using encryption but the problem still remains that if node2 sends node1 data, then node3 will be able to see that a transaction happened between node 2 and node1, the data itself will be encrypted and unreadable to node3 but node3 will still be able to know that the other 2 nodes are communicating and how often they are communicating.

Is there a way to stop node3 from seeing node2's activity and vice versa?

Answer 1

The short answer is: If you don't want party 2 and party 3 to see anything that each other are doing, you should probably not be using a blockchain for this. In a permissioned environment every blockchain transaction has to be signed by somebody, otherwise there is no way to assess whether it comes from an entity which has permission to transact. And every participant is going to see that signature. Still, perhaps this can be workable if parties 2 and 3 don't know each other's address, and therefore don't know who is behind these transactions.