SPChain: A Smart and Private Blockchain-Enabled Framework for Combining GDPR-Compliant Digital Assets Management With AI Models

In the traditional approach to a digital asset management system, the data processing mechanism is not transparent or visible to the data owners since the data is managed solely by the service provider. With the rapid development of blockchain technology, the above issues can be resolved by leveraging the tamper-resistance and decentralization characteristics of blockchain. However, post the implementation of the EU General Data Protection Rules (GDPR) in 2018, the protection of data owners has taken center stage. This has led to several principles of personal data deletion, such as Storage Limit and the Right to Be Forgotten to conflict with the blockchain. It is also observed that, out of the various smart contracts deployed to manage digital assets, often only specific smart contracts are invoked, while the rest of the deployed smart contracts are rarely invoked, leading to smart contract designs exhibiting similar patterns with very little creativity. This current scenario has motivated us to propose SPChain, a smarter and private GDPR-compliant digital asset management framework enabled by blockchain. In this approach, a decentralized InterPlanetary File System has been adopted to solve the problem of SPOF. In addition, the combination of digital assets with artificial intelligence models has been proposed so as to make digital assets accessible to a larger number of applications and to enable better creativity. In this design, artificial intelligence models have been run in independent, virtualized containers and invoked through smart contracts. The proposed SPChain can be applied to the field of digital art management to provide a complete implementation based on the Hyperledger Fabric. Using this proposed framework, model developers, digital art creators, collectors, service providers, as well as third parties can not only benefit from securely managing digital assets and combining them with AI models, but also from simultaneously complying with the rights stipulated in the GDPR. During the course of the experiments conducted, the latency, throughput, and resource consumption of different functions in the smart contracts have been measured. After adjusting the batch timeout of the block and the maximum number of transactions in a block, the throughputs were observed to be about 500 TPS, with 10 to 15 TPS for reading and writing operations, respectively. The latency ranges were found to range from 0 to 7 seconds, with 2.5 to 5 seconds for reading and writing operations, respectively.