Sharing secured data on peer-to-peer applications using attribute-based encryption

ABSTRACT The strong growth of communication and storage gives rise to the significantly increasing demand for collecting, storing, and sharing a large amount of data on networks. This is further enhanced by the data-driven market, where everyone wants to access other parties' data. Data is the bedrock of today's technologies and researchers, especially in machine learning and deep learning. The business value of organizations is also massively data-dependent. Recent studies and industry applications can apply analytic techniques for exploiting data, or Internet users can exchange data on social networks or peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. However, sharing secured data is a challenging problem that attracts much attention from researchers. Sharing secure data with a group of users using P2P applications faces the unavailability problem of peer nodes. Thus users cannot certify and download the protected data. This affects a P2P-based application class of sharing and storing online services or customer-to-customer e-commerce applications. This article proposes a solution for sharing secured data on P2P-based applications using blockchain and attribute-based encryption. The attribute-based encryption guarantees sharing keys among a group of users, while blockchain guarantees keys distribution. We have simulated the proposed solution on the mobile peer-to-peer network that provides services for sharing and storing data securely.