Secure Interoperation of Blockchain and IPFS Through Client Application Enabled by CP-ABE

Abstract

In recent years, personal health data can be collected via wearable devices and sensors and used for healthcare services improvement through data sharing. To share sensitive personal health data securely, many frameworks and approaches using blockchain-based systems have been proposed. However, the issue of letting individuals control and manage their data with privacy-preserving is still to be solved. In this paper, we propose a new model of Individual-Initiated Auditable Access Control (IIAAC) enabled with blockchain, CP-ABE (Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption) and IPFS (Inter-Planetary File System) for privacy-preserved data sharing. We describe the system architecture, its main components for our proposed model, and the protocols to make blockchain and IPFS interoperate with each other via a client application, including key generation, data publication, and data retrieval. We further build an experiment environment to evaluate the performance of our proposed model and architecture. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed model and system architecture for privacy-preserved data sharing.