Blockchain-based data governance for privacy-preserving in multi-stakeholder settings

Abstract

In multi-stakeholder systems, such as healthcare, the Internet of Things, and supply chain management, there is frequent data generation, exchange, and sharing. As a result, data owners often desire control over their data and maintain privacy, while data consumers require methods to ascertain the origins and creators of the data. These conflicts of interest require developing data governance systems that guarantee data provenance, privacy protection, consent management, and selective disclosure. This research proposed a decentralized data governance system utilizing blockchain technology, proxy re-encryption (PRE), and Boneh, Boyen, and Shacham (BBS) signatures to address these challenges. The proposed system enables data owners to control, selectively share, and track their data through privacy-enhancing, consent management, and selective disclosure mechanisms while also allowing data consumers to understand the lineage of the data through a blockchain-based provenance mechanism. As a case study, the research examined and evaluated electronic prescriptions involving sensitive data and multiple stakeholders, including patients as data owners and doctors and pharmacists as data consumers. The research was structured as a collection of published articles organized in the following sequence: problem formulation and developing smart contracts, implementing privacy and consent management through PRE, and applying BBS signatures for selective data sharing. The proof-of-concept implementation and evaluations, conducted using CosmWasm, Hyperledger Besu, Ethereum, pyUmbral PRE, and BBS signatures, demonstrate that the proposed decentralized system is platform-agnostic, scalable, and capable of providing a higher level of transparency, privacy, and trust with minimal overhead.