AccountTrade: Accountability Against Dishonest Big Data Buyers and Sellers

In this paper, a set of accountable protocols denoted as AccountTrade is proposed for big data trading among dishonest consumers. For achieving a secure big data trading environment, AccountTrade achieves book-keeping ability and accountability against dishonest consumers throughout the trading (i.e., buying and selling) of datasets. We investigate the consumers' responsibilities in the dataset trading, then we design AccountTrade to achieve accountability against dishonest consumers that are likely to deviate from the responsibilities. Specifically, a uniqueness index is defined and proposed, which is a new rigorous measurement of the data uniqueness for this purpose. Furthermore, several accountable trading protocols are presented to enable data brokers to blame the misbehaving entities when misbehavior is detected. The accountability of AccountTrade is formally defined, proved, and evaluated by an automatic verification tool as well as extensive simulation with real-world datasets. Our evaluation shows that AccountTrade incurs at most 10-kB storage overhead per file, and it is capable of 8-1000 concurrent data upload requests per server.