A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing Scheme with Security-Enhanced Access Control

Abstract

In the data-driven economy, data sharing is a key approach to unleashing the true value of data. Blockchain, as a decentralized ledger, can provide a trusted data sharing platform in an untrusted environment. However, existing blockchain-based data sharing schemes suffer from inefficiency and inadequate protection of security and privacy. To address the above issues, we propose a blockchain-based privacy-preserving data sharing scheme with security-enhanced access control. In the scheme, a secure data sharing architecture using dual-blockchain and the interplanetary file system (IPFS) is presented to provide decentralized and scalable storage. Based on the architecture, a blockchain-assisted multi-authority attribute-based encryption (BA-MA-ABE) algorithm with efficient attribute revocation and computation is designed in our work. Our BA-MA-ABE lever-ages blockchain to securely manage partial decryption keys and provides fine-grained access control over encrypted data. We also devise smart contracts that can support traceable access control over the flow of data while protecting user identity privacy with verifiable attribute credentials. In comparison with some existing work, our scheme shows more comprehensive security features with lower user computation overhead.