Blockchain-Based Smart Advertising Network With Privacy-Preserving Accountability

Abstract

In a smart advertising network (SAN), a broker builds user profiles from its wealth of user data, manages advertisements for retailers, and disseminates the advertisements through multiple channels. However, the broker sometimes provides insufficient transparency explanations of advertising activities, which may result in the increasing popularity of ad-blocking software and lower advertising investments from retailers. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based Smart Advertising Network with Privacy-preserving Accountability (SANPA). Specifically, we design a composite Succinct Non-interactive Argument (SNARG) system, that commits advertising policies as cryptographic authenticators in a smart contract. By doing so,SANPAis compatible with the existingSANwithout posing prohibitive implementation cost over the blockchain architecture. Users or retailers can require explanations of an advertising activity by sending a challenge to the smart contract. With the succinctness and privacy preservation of theSNARGsystem, the smart contract can efficiently verify whether the challenged advertising activity follows committed advertising policies without exposing user profile privacy. If any misconduct is identified, the contract enforces public accountability on the misbehaving party by confiscating its cryptocurrency deposits. We conduct extensive experiments to provide both on-chain and off-chain benchmarks, which demonstrates the application feasibility ofSANPA.