Blockchain as a Notarization Service for Data Sharing with Personal Data Store

Abstract

Personal data such as electronic medical records and academic records are critical and sensitive private information. These personal information is usually hosted across many data-custodian systems. Personal Data Store (PDS) is a service that lets an individual store, manage and deploy their key personal data in a highly secure and structured way. It also gives the user a central point of control for their personal information. One of the inherent problems of digital records is that it can be easily forged. Therefore, the data-consumer(with whom the data is shared) often needs to verify the authenticity of the shared document/record by communicating with the document/certificate issuing authority (e.g., data custodian). However, this process is time consuming and inefficient. In recent time, blockchain has gained tremendous attention from both industry and academia for distributed recording and immutable transactions. Blockchain provides a shared, immutable and transparent history of transactions enabling the building of applications that incorporate trust, accountability and transparency. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a secure and trustable data sharing system using blockchain. However, blockchain is primarily proposed for publicly verifiable transactions and does not provide privacy to the individuals. In this paper, we propose a data sharing framework that will guarantee the authenticity of the shared data in real-time and provide transactional privacy in a blockchain network. We have implemented our framework in a prototype that ensures privacy, integrity, and fine-grained access control over the shared data. The proposed work can significantly reduce the turnaround time for data sharing, improve the decision making process and reduce the overall cost.