A Privacy-Preserving Blockchain Framework for Personal Data Sharing

Cloud computing enables highly scalable services to be easily consumed over the Internet on an as-needed basis. A major feature of the cloud services is that users’ data are usually processed remotely in unknown machines that users do not own or operate. Data sharing is an important functionality in cloud storage. In this paper, we show how to securely, efficiently, and flexibly share data with others in cloud storage. A common data-sharing management platform is indispensable in the existing data-sharing solutions, and users upload their data to the cloud server for storage and dissemination. However, from the moment users upload the data to the server, they will lose absolute ownership of their data, and security and privacy will become a critical issue. Although data encryption and access control are considered up-and coming technologies in protecting personal data security on the cloud server, they alleviate this problem to a certain extent. However, it still depends too much on a third-party organization’s credibility, the Cloud Service Provider (CSP). In this paper, we combined blockchain, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), and Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) to address this problem to propose a privacy-preserving blockchain Framework for personal data sharing.