Decentralizing Privacy: Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Data

By Guy Zyskind, Oz Nathan, Alex Pentland. 2015 IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops, 2015

2,305 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The recent increase in reported incidents of surveillance and security breaches compromising users' privacy call into question the current model, in which third-parties collect and control massive amounts of personal data. Bit coin has demonstrated in the financial space that trusted, auditable computing is possible using a decentralized network of peers accompanied by a public ledger. In this paper, we describe a decentralized personal data management system that ensures users own and control their data. We implement a protocol that turns a block chain into an automated access-control manager that does not require trust in a third party. Unlike Bit coin, transactions in our system are not strictly financial -- they are used to carry instructions, such as storing, querying and sharing data. Finally, we discuss possible future extensions to block chains that could harness them into a well-rounded solution for trusted computing problems in society.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4b9184937da308914b9e13c43bfd75845eaf910b

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Citations in the corpus

Blockchain in government: Benefits and implications of distributed ledger technology for information sharing (2017, background): “Increased control Zyskind and Nathan (2015); Kraft (2016); Mainelli and Smith (2015) Increased control by needing consensus to add transactions.”
The state of play of blockchain technology in the financial services sector: A systematic literature review (2020, background): “Eventually, use of the blockchain could result in a new form of digital disruption and financial transformation (Böhme et al., 2015; Zyskind et al., 2015; Liebenau & Elaluf-Calderwood, 2016; Zhao, et al., 2016).”
Blockchain in Industries: A Survey (2019, methodology): “which are connected and secured using encryption algorithms [2].”
Blockchain for 5G and Beyond Networks: A State of the Art Survey (2019, background): “As an example, blockchain is feasible to protect user data for decentralized personal data management [196], which enables to provide personalized services.”
Privacy-Preserving Solutions for Blockchain: Review and Challenges (2019, background): “Based on it, only the work proposed by [146] was intended to deal with privacy aspects based on the use of blockchain.”
Smart Contract-Based Access Control for the Internet of Things (2018, methodology): “The idea of using the blockchain to only store access control policies has also been adopted in [27] and [28].”
Integrated digital twin and blockchain framework to support accountable information sharing in construction projects (2021, background): “However, it has also been applied in many different areas such as supply chain management [36], privacy preservation [34,37,38], electronic voting [39], and big data management [30].”
Blockchain for Secure and Efficient Data Sharing in Vehicular Edge Computing and Networks (2019, background): “We provide more details about the blockchain-related security performances as follows [25].”
A Survey on Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices (2021, neutral): “Some incentives or regulations schemes are implemented in blockchain [217]–[219], and some incentive mechanisms are proposed for high-quality federated data [220], [221].”
Blockchain Meets IoT: An Architecture for Scalable Access Management in IoT (2018, methodology): “As an example, Wilson and Ateniese [19] described a system to verify the identity of the data and Zyskind et al. [20] described a method to preserve the data ownership of the IoT devices.”
Blockchain Technology as an Enabler of Service Systems: A Structured Literature Review (2017, background): “Serving as a log or ledger to document all transactions and activities that took place within the construct [12, 14, 15, 19–24], it is a linked sequence of transactions [9, 25], in which time-stamped transactions [26] are broadcasted to and shared with participating entities, located in its belongin”
Applications of Blockchains in the Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2019, background): “Another privacy-preserving access model is described in [110] where blockchains and fine-grained access-control policies allow users to govern their own data.”
A Survey of Machine and Deep Learning Methods for Internet of Things (IoT) Security (2018, background): “A blockchain delivers a decentralised database (called ‘digital ledger’) of transactions, of which each node on the network is aware [289].”
A Survey on Information and Communication Technologies for Industry 4.0: State-of-the-Art, Taxonomies, Perspectives, and Challenges (2019, background): “0 ecosystem such as the IoT [298], mobile/edge computing, Online Social Networks [299], Cyber-Physical Systems.”
Evolution of Consumption: A Psychological Ownership Framework (2020, background): “…use of cryptocurrency (e.g., Bitcoin), blockchain open source commuting platforms (e.g., Ethereum), or emerging decentralized autonomous organization, a complex form of smart contracts using token governance rules (Zyskind, Nathan, and Pentland 2015), which offer multiple research opportunities.”
Blockchain Based Access Control (2017, neutral): “For example, the blockchain could save only a tinyurl or a torrent descriptor pointing to an external source hosting the actual policy (written in a standard format as, for example, XACML) [12].”
A Blockchain-Based Framework for Data Sharing With Fine-Grained Access Control in Decentralized Storage Systems (2018, background): “In order to allow data owner to own and control their own data, a personal data management system based on blockchain technology [15] has been proposed, the system can get better protection of the privacy of users data.”