Fair Data Marketing in HCN

In data marketing, a data owner can sell his/her data to a data buyer for profit considerations. The data buyer can utilize the data for various data-intensive applications, such as AI-assisted network management in HCN. With data privacy laws taking effect, it is essential to preserve the rights of data owners including data access control and identity privacy. At the same time, fair payment for the data owner and honest data delivery for the data buyer are also critical for the development of data marketing. In this chapter, we propose a blockchain–cloud data marketing scheme that complies with privacy regulations and preserves marketing fairness. First, we adopt a hybrid marketing model that utilizes the cloud server as a powerful data storage unit and the blockchain as a reliable controller of data marketing. By doing so, on-chain storage and computation costs are significantly reduced by only recording critical data marketing operations rather than the large volume of data. Second, we design succinct commitments of data marketing operations for data owners, data buyers, and the cloud server with efficient on-chain verifications. Through financial incentives and accountability enforcement, the proposed scheme achieves fair data marketing even with a rational off-chain cloud server. Third, we tailor the designs of multi-message PS signature and the threshold cryptograph for distributed management of data owners’ anonymous credentials. Specifically, distributed credential issuance and threshold identity tracing are realized without a single certificate authority. We conduct thorough security analysis and extensive experiments on a consortium blockchain network with different settings, which demonstrates that the proposed marketing scheme achieves the security goals and is practical for implementation.