A Secure Data Sharing Platform Using Blockchain and Interplanetary File System

Abstract

In a research community, data sharing is an essential step to gain maximum knowledge from the prior work. Existing data sharing platforms depend on trusted third party (TTP). Due to the involvement of TTP, such systems lack trust, transparency, security, and immutability. To overcome these issues, this paper proposed a blockchain-based secure data sharing platform by leveraging the benefits of interplanetary file system (IPFS). A meta data is uploaded to IPFS server by owner and then divided into n secret shares. The proposed scheme achieves security and access control by executing the access roles written in smart contract by owner. Users are first authenticated through RSA signatures and then submit the requested amount as a price of digital content. After the successful delivery of data, the user is encouraged to register the reviews about data. These reviews are validated through Watson analyzer to filter out the fake reviews. The customers registering valid reviews are given incentives. In this way, maximum reviews are submitted against every file. In this scenario, decentralized storage, Ethereum blockchain, encryption, and incentive mechanism are combined. To implement the proposed scenario, smart contracts are written in solidity and deployed on local Ethereum test network. The proposed scheme achieves transparency, security, access control, authenticity of owner, and quality of data. In simulation results, an analysis is performed on gas consumption and actual cost required in terms of USD, so that a good price estimate can be done while deploying the implemented scenario in real set-up. Moreover, computational time for different encryption schemes are plotted to represent the performance of implemented scheme, which is shamir secret sharing (SSS). Results show that SSS shows the least computational time as compared to advanced encryption standard (AES) 128 and 256.

When Blockchain Meets Distributed File Systems: An Overview, Challenges, and Open Issues

“…To achieve the fine-grained access control, a data owner can distribute secret keys for other users, and encrypt his data under a certain access policy. Then, towards transparency and quality of data, Naz et al [56] proposed a secure digital-asset sharing framework based on integrated technology by combining IPFS, blockchain and encryption mechanisms. Next, Huang et al [31] proposed an Ethereum-based network-view sharing platform, which can bring global trustworthiness for multiple domains such as different IoT domain networks.…”

Blockchain-Based Secure Data Storage for Distributed Vehicular Networks

“…IPFS is used for distributed data storage while considering the issues of centralized systems, such as single point of failure, data leakage, etc. [27]. In IPFS, data integrity is also achieved using the unique hashes assigned to data blocks.…”

Subscription-Based Data-Sharing Model Using Blockchain and Data as a Service

“…Authors in [16] proposed a blockchain-based secure datasharing platform. The proposed model used IPFS to store the data in a secured manner.…”

“…1) Before sending a request, the user digitally signs and encrypts the request using his private key and DP's public key. Return ''Access denied, invalid user''; 16: end if 17: Result: Access Granted/Access Denied 2) The user sends the request to DP.…”