Meta-Key: A Secure Data-Sharing Protocol under Blockchain-Based Decentralised Storage Architecture

TL;DR

Meta-key is a novel blockchain-based data-sharing protocol that securely manages encrypted data keys and employs proxy re-encryption to facilitate safe sharing in untrusted environments.

Contribution

It introduces a secure, blockchain-integrated data-sharing mechanism with encrypted key management and proxy re-encryption, enhancing security and ease of access control.

Findings

Secure key management via blockchain storage.

Proxy re-encryption prevents collusion attacks.

Model ensures secure data sharing in untrusted environments.

Abstract

In this letter we propose Meta-key, a data-sharing mechanism that enables users share their encrypted data under a blockchain-based decentralized storage architecture. All the data-encryption keys are encrypted by the owner's public key and put onto the blockchain for safe and secure storage and easy key-management. Encrypted data are stored in dedicated storage nodes and proxy re-encryption mechanism is used to ensure secure data-sharing in the untrusted environment. Security analysis of our model shows that the proxy re-encryption adopted in our system is naturally free from collusion-attack due to the specific architecture of Meta-key.