A Blockchain-Based Framework for Data Sharing With Fine-Grained Access Control in Decentralized Storage Systems

TLDR

Attribute‑based encryption is key for privacy but allows a private key generator to decrypt all data, and centralized cloud storage suffers from single‑point failure; blockchain‑based decentralized storage mitigates these issues. The paper proposes a decentralized data storage and sharing framework that integrates IPFS, Ethereum, and ABE to enable secure, fine‑grained access control. In the framework, owners issue secret keys and encrypt data under access policies, while smart contracts on Ethereum provide keyword search over ciphertext, ensuring correct retrieval and preventing server misbehavior. Experiments on Linux and the Rinkeby test network demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

Abstract

In traditional cloud storage systems, attribute-based encryption (ABE) is regarded as an important technology for solving the problem of data privacy and fine-grained access control. However, in all ABE schemes, the private key generator has the ability to decrypt all data stored in the cloud server, which may bring serious problems such as key abuse and privacy data leakage. Meanwhile, the traditional cloud storage model runs in a centralized storage manner, so single point of failure may leads to the collapse of system. With the development of blockchain technology, decentralized storage mode has entered the public view. The decentralized storage approach can solve the problem of single point of failure in traditional cloud storage systems and enjoy a number of advantages over centralized storage, such as low price and high throughput. In this paper, we study the data storage and sharing scheme for decentralized storage systems and propose a framework that combines the decentralized storage system interplanetary file system, the Ethereum blockchain, and ABE technology. In this framework, the data owner has the ability to distribute secret key for data users and encrypt shared data by specifying access policy, and the scheme achieves fine-grained access control over data. At the same time, based on smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, the keyword search function on the cipher text of the decentralized storage systems is implemented, which solves the problem that the cloud server may not return all of the results searched or return wrong results in the traditional cloud storage systems. Finally, we simulated the scheme in the Linux system and the Ethereum official test network Rinkeby, and the experimental results show that our scheme is feasible.