Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preservation Platform for Data Storage and Query Processing

Privacy-preservation policies are guidelines and recommendations formulated to protect data provider’s private data in data repositories. Previous privacy-preservation methodologies have addressed privacy in which data are permanently stored in repositories and disconnected from changing data provider privacy preferences. This occurrence becomes evident as data moves to another data repository. Moreover, the ability of data providers to flexibly update or change their privacy preferences when it is required is a known challenge. Hence, the need for data providers to control their existing privacy preferences due to data usage changes continues to remain a problem. This paper proposes a blockchain-based methodology/framework for privacy preservation of data provider’s private and sensitive data. The research proposes to tightly couple data provider’s private attribute data element to privacy preferences and data accessor data elements into a privacy tuple. The implementation presents a framework of tightly-coupled relational database and blockchains. This delivers a secure, tamper-resist-ant, and query-efficient platform for management and query processing of data provider’s private data. The evaluation analysis from the implementation offers a validation based on the query processing output of privacy-aware queries on the privacy infrastructure.