Access Control Management for Plant Phenotyping Using Integrated Blockchain

Abstract

The high demand for food makes it necessary to implement plant phenotyping processes into breeding programs to deal with global food security. Image-based plant phenotyping generates vast amounts of data. Traditionally, this data has been managed in a centralized manner requiring that an administrator grants access permissions. This approach has some limitations when sharing data; for instance, we cannot track whether data has been shared with the permission of the owner. This research proposes a blockchain-based system for data access control management in the field of image-based plant phenotyping. This system integrates Ethereum blockchain to allow users to be the administrators of their data. Thus, users can grant or deny permissions to access their data without relying on any central administrator. This system is part of the research work at the Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre (P2IRC) in Saskatoon, Canada.