A Decentralized File Sharing Framework for Sensitive Data

Abstract

Access management of files which contain sensitive personal data such as electronic health records, financial history of individuals or legal documents is a challenge, because of the variety of participating entities such as legal institutions and privacy of the files. Trust among the entities are generally provided by a central authority such as a government agency. Blockchain technology and distributed file systems provide an opportunity to address this issue without having a central authority to rely on. The lack of a central authority provides a better security as no single entity can control the whole system. However, it brings up other issues. One of the main issues is to manage access rights of sensitive data in the system. In this work, we present a framework for sharing critical document using IPFS and Blockchain technology. Rather than providing framework specific to a single domain such as electronic health records or legal document sharing, we propose a general framework which can be tailored for the specific domains.