Blockchain-Cloud Transparent Data Marketing: Consortium Management and Fairness

Data are generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices and centralized at a cloud server, that can later be traded with third parties, i.e., data marketing, to enable various data-intensive applications. However, the centralized approach is recently under debate due to the lack of (1) transparent and distributed marketplace management, and (2) marketing fairness for both IoT users (data sellers) and third parties (data buyers). In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-Cloud Transparent Data Marketing (Block-DM) with consortium management and executable fairness. First, we introduce a hybrid data-marketing architecture, where the cloud acts as an efficient data management unit and a consortium blockchain serves as a transparent marketing controller. Under the architecture, consent-based secure data trading and identity privacy for data owners are achieved with the distributed credential issuance and threshold credential openings. Second, with a consortium committee, we design a fair on/off-chain data marketing protocol. By financial incentives and succinct ‘commitments’ of marketing operations, the protocol can achieve the marketing fairness and effective detection of unfair marketing operations. We demonstrate the security of Block-DM with thorough analysis. We conduct extensive experiments with a consortium blockchain network on Hyperledger Fabric to show the feasibility and practicality of Block-DM.