PriME-Deal: Privacy-Preserving Bilateral Data Trading with Efficient Matchmaking and Auditable Fair Exchange on Blockchain

Abstract: Bilateral attribute-based access control for data trading must hide policies, provide cryptographic fairness, and avoid trusted third parties. Existing solutions either leak policy information, incur super-linear costs, or rely on trusted dispute resolution. We present PriME-Deal, a non-interactive protocol that simultaneously achieves policy-hiding bilateral matching, efficient threshold access control, and auditable fair exchange on public blockchains. The seller embeds a secret token under the buyer policy into an oblivious key-value store with pseudorandom masking; the buyer reconstructs the token locally via tag-based probing, eliminating combinatorial enumeration, and proves correctness in zero-knowledge. Fair exchange is enforced through a collateralized on-chain reveal with a cryptographic audit that penalizes misbehaviour without trusted parties. We prove security in the Universal Composability framework under standard assumptions. Compared with the state-of-the-art threshold fuzzy IB-ME scheme, the seller's publishing time is reduced by two orders of magnitude (e.g., 8.76s vs. 690s for a policy of 500 attributes). For a typical configuration of (200,20,5), the buyer completes token reconstruction and proof generation in 8.9s, with the zero-knowledge proof taking under 0.6s and remaining constant across all parameter scales. The on-chain cost is approximately 28.6M gas, well within Ethereum's block limit. PriME-Deal thus delivers the first practical privacy-preserving data trading protocol that combines linear seller overhead, bilateral policy hiding, and auditable fairness.