A novel privacy protection method of residents’ travel trajectories based on federated blockchain and InterPlanetary file systems in smart cities

Abstract

The government does have to record and analyze the travel trajectories of urban residents aiming to effectively control the epidemic during COVID-19. However, these privacy-related data are usually stored in centralized cloud databases, which are prone to be vulnerable to cyber attacks leading to personal trajectory information leakage. In this article, we proposed a novel secure sharing and storing method of personal travel trajectory data based on BC and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). We adopt the Hyperledger Fabric, the representative of Federated BC framework, combined with the IPFS storage to form a novel mode of querying on-chain and storing off-chain aiming to both achieve the effectiveness of data processing and protect personal privacy-related information. This method firstly solves the efficiency problem of traditional public BC and ensures the security of stored data by storing the ciphertext of complete personal travel trajectory data in decentralized IPFS storage. Secondly, considering the huge amount of information of residents’ travel trajectories, the method proposed in this article can obtain the complete information under the chain stored in IPFS by querying the index on the chain, which significantly improves the data processing efficiency of residents’ travel trajectories and thus promotes the effective control of the new crown pneumonia epidemic. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed solution is verified through performance evaluation and security analysis.