Privacy-Preserving Data Management using Blockchains

Abstract: Privacy-preservation policies are guidelines formulated to protect data providers private data. 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. Hence, the need for data providers to control and flexibly update their existing privacy preferences due to changing data usage continues to remain a problem. This paper proposes a blockchain-based methodology for preserving data providers private and sensitive data. The research proposes to tightly couple data providers private attribute data element to privacy preferences and data accessor data element into a privacy tuple. The implementation presents a framework of tightly-coupled relational database and blockchains. This delivers secure, tamper-resistant, and query-efficient platform for data management and query processing. The evaluation analysis from the implementation validates efficient query processing of privacy-aware queries on the privacy infrastructure.