Secure Photo Sharing Across Platforms Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of online social networks (OSNs), photo sharing has become increasingly prevalent, raising significant privacy and security concern. Existing approaches, like centralized access control mechanisms and encryption-based privacy solutions, suffer from inconsistent policy enforcement, unauthorized access risk, and lack of transparency. Moreover, traditional OSN platforms afford limited control over the dissemination of content with respect to counteracting illegal reproductions. In order to address these challenges, Photo Chain is designed. The relevance of this name derives from its concept of using a blockchain mechanism to enable photo sharing in social networks securely and in a controlled manner. The system has smart contracts for dynamic access control, PreHash for photo integrity verification, and Gaussian Blur for the protection of sensitive regions. Dissemination control also provides various ways to prevent unauthorized sharing of photos. Ethereum-based smart contracts maintain an immutable log of transactions to guarantee privacy and transparency through user-defined access policies. A functional prototype has also been developed and tested for security, privacy, and controlled dissemination of pictures through OSNs. This prototype has demonstrated the usefulness of Photo Chain.