Security Enhancements for Data-Driven Systems: A Blockchain-Based Trustworthy Data Sharing Scheme

Abstract

With the increasingly prominent value of big data, data sharing within enterprises and organizations has become increasingly popular, and many institutions have established data centers to achieve effective data storage and sharing. Meanwhile, cyberspace data security and privacy have become the most critical issue that people are concerned about since shared data often involves commercial secrets and sensitive information. At present, data encryption techniques have been applied to protect the security of the sensitive data stored in and shared by the data centers. However, the challenges of efficient data sharing, secure management of decryption keys, deduplication of the plaintext, and transparency and auditability of the data access arise. These challenges may obstruct the development of data sharing in data-driven systems. To meet these challenges, we propose a secure and trustworthy data sharing scheme and introduce blockchain, proxy re-encryption (PRE), and trusted execution environments (TEEs) into the data-driven systems. Our scheme mainly enables (1) automatic distribution and management of the decryption keys, (2) reduction of the reduplicative data, and (3) trustworthy data sharing and recording. Finally, we implement the proposed scheme and compare it with other existing schemes. It is demonstrated that our scheme reduces the computation and communication overhead.