Scientific Reports (Dec 2023)
Investigation of personal data protection mechanism based on blockchain technology
Abstract
Abstract Blockchain technology is increasingly being used in personal data protection. Inspired by the importance of data security, this paper proposes a personal data protection mechanism based on blockchain, combined with distributed hash tables and cryptography, to enhance users' control over the data generated using web applications. This paper designs this mechanism's system model and describes the three aspects in detail: data storage mechanism, data encryption mechanism, and data trading mechanism. Among them, the data storage mechanism restricts user data to be stored only in the local storage space of the user terminal, the decentralized blockchain network, and the distributed hash table network to ensure that enterprises providing network applications cannot privately store user interaction data, the encryption mechanism is responsible for encrypting all user data recorded in the network and allows users to control the key of the data to ensure the security of the user data in the blockchain and distributed hash tables, the data transaction mechanism allows users to trade their data, and to incentivize enterprises to assist users in collecting personal data, data transaction contracts are built into the data transaction mechanism, allowing enterprises to receive a share of the revenue from user data transactions. Then, for data transactions, use the Stackelberg game to simulate the revenue sharing between users and service providers in data trading to incentivize enterprises providing web services to assist users in collecting their data. The simulation results show that when the number of users is 1000, the revenues of this scheme for service providers are 31%, 561%, and 19% higher than the existing scheme. Finally, the personal data protection platform is implemented by code to verify the feasibility of the theory proposed in this paper in personal data protection.