BEIR:A Blockchain-based Encrypted Image Retrieval Scheme

Abstract

Encrypted image retrieval may return incorrect or incomplete results due to threats from malicious cloud servers. Most of the existing solutions focus on the efficiency and accuracy of retrieval, lack of verification of the completeness of search results, to achieve the reliability of search results and the transparency of the search process, we explore characteristic such as the decentralization and tamper-proof of blockchain, proposed a blockchain-based encrypted image retrieval scheme. This scheme stores the encrypted index on the blockchain (Ethereum), through the blockchain consensus mechanism and the function of searching on the smart contract, ensures the integrity and correctness of search results, then outsources the corresponding encrypted images to the cloud server to reduce storage cost, and designs a double-layer index structure using the bag of visual word model and simhash in the process of image similarity index. Experiments show that the reliability, high retrieval efficiency, and precision of the scheme also have a good privacy protection effect.