A Consortium Blockchain-Enabled Evidence Sharing System for Public Interest Litigation

Procuratorates, as the prosecutor in public interest litigation (PIL), need to obtain evidence from other PIL stakeholders including citizens, companies, governmental agencies, IoT monitoring devices and so on. However, the evidence sharing is not smooth due to the lack of secure data sharing and privacy protection during case investigation and evidence collection. Therefore, the authors propose a consortium blockchain-based secure data sharing and privacy protection scheme named PILChain. The involved organizations are connected as peers in PILChain. The safety of uploaded evidence and user privacy can be guaranteed with a fine-grained access control and zero-knowledge identity proof. InterPlanetary File System is introduced to store large evidence files off-chain, further enhancing the data security and system scalability. The security of PILChain is analyzed in terms of access control, evidence confidentiality, evidence integrity, traceability, privacy, and scalability. Last, the authors evaluate the performance of the developed prototype system by implementing PILChain on Hyperledger Fabric.