Tracking GDPR Compliance in Cloud-Based Service Delivery

Abstract

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has had a far-reaching impact on data privacy and compliance for cloud providers. GDPR influences access to, storage, processing and transmission of personal data, requiring these operations to be verified by a cloud user through explicit consent prior to execution. GDPR rules implemented for such operations can be ambiguous and often open to interpretation, making manual verification a time consuming and error prone process for cloud providers. An encoding of GDPR rules is described, with each operation carried out using these rules recorded into a Blockchain for auditing purposes. Specifically, this work shows how some GDPR rules can appear asopcodesin smart contracts to verify the operations of providers on user data in a transparent and automatic way. An abstract model is designed to demonstrate how cloud providers can access and deploy such smart contracts through a Blockchain-based virtual machine. A case study is used to demonstrate how this approach can be used in practice. The case study uses a collection of design patterns and smart contracts to verify provider operations, includingread,write,executionandtransferon user data. Validation is undertaken by deploying the smart contracts in a Blockchain test network to investigate the execution costs of GDPR compliance checking.