A Blockchain-Enabled Framework for Storage and Retrieval of Social Data
Aishwarya Parab, Prakhar Pradhan, Yogesh Simmhan, Arnab K. Paul
TL;DR
The paper addresses trust, provenance, and secure access challenges in multi-source smart-city data by proposing a blockchain-enabled framework built on Hyperledger Fabric and IPFS. It combines on-chain metadata and provenance with off-chain data storage, employing a BFT-based consensus and trust scoring to validate contributions from both trusted and untrusted sources. The architecture includes role-based chaincode, data upload/download workflows, and data provenance guarantees, with a preliminary evaluation using 52 traffic videos showing low overhead for metadata storage and efficient retrieval via CID references. The findings suggest practical feasibility for secure, scalable data management in smart city contexts, with future work aimed at larger datasets, enhanced trust scoring, and different blockchain configurations.
Abstract
The increasing availability of data from diverse sources, including trusted entities such as governments, as well as untrusted crowd-sourced contributors, demands a secure and trustworthy environment for storage and retrieval. Blockchain, as a distributed and immutable ledger, offers a promising solution to address these challenges. This short paper studies the feasibility of a blockchain-based framework for secure data storage and retrieval across trusted and untrusted sources, focusing on provenance, storage mechanisms, and smart contract security. Through initial experiments using Hyper Ledger Fabric (HLF), we evaluate the storage efficiency, scalability, and feasibility of the proposed approach. This study serves as a motivation for future research to develop a comprehensive blockchain-based storage and retrieval framework.