A blockchain-assisted framework for secure and reliable data sharing in distributed systems

The explosive growth of big data is pushing forward the paradigm of cloud-based data store today. Among other, distributed storage systems are widely adopted due to their superior performance and continuous availability. However, due to the potentially wide attacking surfaces of the public cloud, outsourcing data store inevitably raises new concerns on user privacy exposure and unauthorized data access. Besides, directly introducing a centralized third-party authority for query authorization management does not work because it still can be compromised. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-assisted framework that can support trustworthy data sharing services. In particular, data owners allow to outsource their sensitive data to distributed systems in encrypted form. By leveraging smart contracts of blockchain, a data owner can distribute secret keys for authorized users without extra round interaction to generate the permitted search tokens. Meanwhile, such blockchain-assisted framework naturally solves the trust issues of query authorization. Besides, we devise a secure local index framework to support encrypted keyword search with forward privacy and mitigate blockchain overhead. To validate our design, we implement the prototype and deploy it at Amazon Cloud. Extensive experiments demonstrate the security, efficiency, and effectiveness of the blockchain-assisted design.