Trust-enhanced blockchain-enabled framework for secure and privacy-preserving data sharing systems

Abstract

As the era of big data continues to evolve, the importance of effective data management and sharing frameworks continues to emerge. While data sharing can play a crucial role in the big data evolution, privacy and security concerns are among the confronting challenges. With the advent of blockchain, many health and financial entities continue to attract blockchain technology due to its tamper-proof and decentralized framework. In this paper, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving data sharing framework by introducing a trust-enhanced proof of authority consensus scheme with the ability to take into consideration users' trust and protection factors. We then provide an implementation of the proposed scheme to demonstrate its ability to ensure safe data sharing process. We showed that the proposed trust-enhanced proof of authority consensus-enabled data sharing framework can facilitate effective data sharing processes among multiple data owners and data requesters in real practical implementations.