A Privacy and Efficiency-Oriented Data Sharing Mechanism for IoTs
Chao Wang, Shuo Wang, Xiaoman Cheng, Yunhua He, Ke Xiao, Shujia Fan
Abstract
With the volume of data increasing in the Internet of Things, a new business mode, where data owners share their own data to others for rewards, has emerged. Therefore, how to motivate data owners to participate in the data trading process is the main challenge. So far, lots of works focus on the motivation mechanism designing and ensure a fair distribution of profits among data owners. However, some security and privacy issues are still not well solved and the data owners are still unwilling to participate in the process. Especially, when a data provider claims rewards with its real identity for the shared data, the linkage between its real identity and the shared data will expose the participator's private information included in the shared data, such as location information. To protect user's privacy in the scenario, a privacy and efficiency-oriented data sharing mechanism for IoTs is proposed in this paper. We first propose a blockchain-based data sharing framework in which the behavior of all participants will be supervised. Then, in order to hide the real identities of data providers during the data sharing process, an anonymous certificate-based data sharing policy is proposed. At last, two novel non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are designed to hide the identities of qualified data providers while claiming rewards to the system. Through security analysis and performance evaluation, the feasibility and effectiveness of the data sharing scheme are illustrated.