Blockchain-Based Secure Collaboration for Sharing and Accessing Research Data

Abstract

The rapid development in the online services provides individuals or organizations with the convenience to share data. However, security and privacy are major concerns when data are stored and shared in the cloud. The cloud service system, not the data owner, will directly control data access once the data is uploaded to the cloud. There is a strong need for a platform that allows data owners to not only ensure the security and privacy of their data stored in the cloud, but also to control how to share their own data and track data sharing. One solution is that the data owner encrypts the data before uploading them to the cloud and share the key with authorized users. Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a scheme that provides flexible data encryption and access control based on attribute policies. In particular, with ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), the data owner can encrypt the data with a set of attributes and also includes an access policy. The ciphertext can be decrypted by a recipient if and only if his attributes or credentials satisfy the policy of the ciphertext. However, it is challenging to manage the distribution and revocation of ABE keys as well as prevention of illegal key sharing. On the other hand, blockchain has recently received extensive attentions as a distributed ledger to record, verify, and track transactions. This dissertation aims to design and evaluate a platform for data sharing and collaboration by exploiting attribute-based encryption and blockchain technologies. Hyperledger Fabric is a permission blockchain uses to enable a decentralized and secure data sharing environment and preserves user’s privacy. The proposed platform allows data owners to fully

control their data, manage access to the data at a fine-grained level, prevent illegal key sharing and abuse, keep the records of file updates with proof of authorship, and ensure data integrity and privacy.