Decentralizing Privacy: Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Data

Abstract

The recent increase in reported incidents of surveillance and security breaches compromising users' privacy call into question the current model, in which third-parties collect and control massive amounts of personal data. Bitcoin has demonstrated in the financial space that trusted, auditable computing is possible using a decentralized network of peers accompanied by a public ledger. In this paper, we describe a decentralized personal data management system that ensures users own and control their data. We implement a protocol that turns a blockchain into an automated access-control manager that does not require trust in a third party. Unlike Bitcoin, transactions in our system are not strictly financial -they are used to carry instructions, such as storing, querying and sharing data. Finally, we discuss possible future extensions to blockchains that could harness them into a well-rounded solution for trusted computing problems in society.

A Distributed Access Control System for Cloud Federations

“…a) Blockchain-based Access Control: The work of Zyskind et al [12] offers a decentralized privacy solution for personal data that is collected and controlled by a third-party. This model depends on a blockchain, which acts as an access control manager to guarantee transparency over data and retains only pointers (hash) to the data and an off-blockchain Distributed Hashtable (DHT), which can be accessed through the blockchain and stores the encrypted data.…”

“…Enigma deploys a public blockchain to ensure data correctness and an off-chain distributed hash-table (DHT) to assure data privacy. Unlike [12], only references to the data is stored in the DHT, while the actual data is divided over several nodes across the network. Thereby, nodes can compute functions together without leaking information to other nodes.…”

Research on Credit Rating of Weak Credit Group based on Block Chain Technology

“…Block chain technology with its distributed data acquisition and storage capacity, unchangeable timestamp, etc. designed contract [6], after module 1 having completed the data collection and data transmission, combined with the front-end embedded decentralized risk pricing model and the terminal centralized risk pricing model. Borrower credit risk pricing is completed by the two centralized and decentralized systems together, constructing "centralized + decentralized" credit system based on the "block chain +".…”

Security and Privacy for Emerging Smart Community Infrastructures

“…From distributed storage for private information, to distributed online marketing, blockchain can be used to provide distributed audit records (Zyskind et al, 2015). Blockchain distributed agreement is a good choice for smart community negotiation and coordination protocols since it can provide the means to build and maintain a distributed storage of privacysensitive energy usage information without a single owner.…”