TraceChain: A blockchain-based scheme to protect data confidentiality and traceability

The risk of sharing data in cloud computing has gathered increasing attention. After the owner of some confidential data outsources the data to cloud storage services and shares it with others, the data owner lost the control to the data to a large extent. To achieve data sharing while keeping data confidentiality, attribute-based encryption (ABE) can be employed by cloud storage services. However, ABE can only guarantee that outsourced data on the cloud is decrypted by attribute-satisfying users but cannot restrict data from being accessed by dishonest users whose attributes also satisfy the access-control policy. It is impossible for the data owner to control the shared data after it has been decrypted by dishonest users, especially when a set of attribute-satisfying dishonest users may collude. To address this concern, we propose a traceable data sharing scheme called TraceChain. In TraceChain, data is encrypted over a new CP-ABE scheme called E-CP-ABE. Furthermore, the system parameters for generating the private key in E-CP-ABE are uploaded to the private blockchain and transactions are performed on the chain. The data owner can obtain the identity of users by monitoring system parameters simultaneously and control data sharing on the blockchain. To prove the security of our scheme, the security analysis is given in this paper. Meanwhile, experimental results also show that our system is viable and efficient.