Privacy preserving in blockchain-based government data sharing: A Service-On-Chain (SOC) approach

Sharing government data is of great significance to social development, but insecure and inappropriate sharing may lead to privacy breaches. Data sharing in consortium blockchain has provided a promising direction for efficient privacy preserving government data sharing. However, since government data is not owned by a single person or any government employers, it is hard to attribute participants’ responsibility for motivating data sharing behavior in blockchain systems. Furthermore, the scope and scale of government data to be shared among departments is unclear, as the purposes for retrieving shared data are dynamically changing. In order to solve these problems, we propose a Service-On-Chain (or simply, SOC) approach. The SOC approach can effectively identify different departments’ data retrieving requirements while efficiently sharing government data with trustworthiness in data content and controllability in data ownership. In particular, we utilize smart contracts to provide an onchain service to define data sharing agreements between government departments, which can identify ambiguous data retrieving requirements and formalize the process logic. We apply the SOC approach to a real world scenario and demonstrate that the SOC approach provides a feasible solution for secure and efficient sharing of data among government departments.