Hybrid On-/Off-Chain Distributed Storage

Introduction

Personal data produced from widely emerged cyberspace activities are expected to promote information dissemination and engagement, or even make business intelligence more powerful. However, the recent increase in social media incidents of illegal surveillance and data breaches raises questions about the current data ownership model, in which centralized applications collect and control large amounts of user data. We present SocialChain, which is a decentralized online data storage and sharing system based on blockchain that decouples user data and applications to return data ownership to the user. We adopt Personal Data Store to extend off-chain storage for the online data, set up an identity establishment mechanism that can support WebID-based authentication functions using a unique identity assignment (i.e., WebID) as well as certificateless cryptography, and design a general framework that leverages smart contracts to help securely store and share social data in an automated manner.

Reference

SocialChain: Decoupling Social Data and Applications to Return Your Data Ownership, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (CCF-B, JCR Q1), 2021.