Light-weight Privacy Infrastructure - A Blockchain-based Privacy-Preservation Platform for Data Storage and Query Processing
Date
2022-06
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Abstract
Privacy-preservation policies are guidelines and recommendations formulated to protect data provider’s private, sensitive data in data repositories. These policies are implemented using privacy-preservation methodologies. Previous privacy-preservation methodologies have addressed privacy in which data are permanently stored in repositories and disconnected from changing data provider privacy preferences. This becomes evident as the data moves to another data repository. The ability of data providers to flexibly update or change their privacy preferences when it is required is a known challenge. Moreover, the ability for data providers to control their existing privacy preferences due to changes in data usage continues to remain a problem. This research proposes a Light-weight Privacy Infrastructure (LPI); which is a methodology/framework for privacy-preservation of data provider’s private and sensitive data. The approach offers data providers flexibility to easily change and monitor privacy preferences on their stored data when the data usage requirements change. Additionally, the approach offers data providers control over access and usage of their private, sensitive data by data collectors and/or accessors and third-party data accessors. The research proposes to tightly couple data provider’s private attribute data element to privacy preferences and data accessor data elements. The implementation presents a framework of tightly-coupled relational Database Management System (DBMS), blockchains, and genomic data store. The coupled database framework delivers a secure and query-efficient platform for management and query processing of data provider’s private data. The implementation adopts an Alberta biotechnology platform that provides commercial oncogenomic services, as a case study. The healthcare platform processes both cancer-related healthcare data and next generation sequencing (NGS) genomic data. Data privacy in healthcare data is a necessary requirement in the processing of data provider private and sensitive data across varied data repositories. The implementation provides data providers (i.e., patients) and data collectors and/or accessors (for e.g., physicians) the platform to efficiently manage data whiles eliminating the risks of privacy breaches and unauthorized data access. The major contributions are: first, provide an approach to tightly couple data provider private, sensitive data with privacy preferences, and data accessor data elements into a privacy tuple. Second, provide a tightly-coupled immutable, tamper-resistant data processing platform where data providers monitor and control all forms of access to their private, sensitive data. Third, provide implementation of a privacy infrastructure where data providers have maximum flexibility to change their privacy preferences on all transactions processed on their underlying private, sensitive data without requiring the data collector. Finally, provide an implementation framework applicable to healthcare and genomic data processing that uses a biotechnology platform as a case study. The evaluation analysis from the implementation procedures offers a validation for the research based on the query processing output of privacy-aware queries on the privacy infrastructure.
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Keywords
Data Privacy, Privacy-Preservation, Blockchains Technology, Privacy Model, Privacy-preserving Databases
Citation
Mireku Kwakye, M. (2022). Light-weight privacy infrastructure - a blockchain-based privacy-preservation platform for data storage and query processing (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.