BDUA: Blockchain-Based Data Usage Auditing

Abstract

Personal data are often collected and processed in a decentralized fashion, within different contexts. For instance, with the emergence of distributed applications, several providers are used to correlate their records, to provide personalized services to their clients. As such, to protect users' privacy, different pseudonyms are generally used for different contexts. These pseudonyms have to be unlinkable to prevent identifying records to be associated to the same user. Although unlinkable, these pseudonyms have to be processed and exchanged according to their owners' consent and in a privacy-preserving fashion. In this paper, we propose BDUA, a new Blockchain-based Data Usage Auditing system, that ensures a controlled yet privacy preserving exchange of distributed data, such that a set of authorized auditing entities are able to conduct an accurate auditing relying on registered blockchains' transactions.