The paper entitled “ID-based self-encryption via Hyperledger Fabric based smart contract” has been accepted for presentation at the 2nd EAI International Conference on Blockchain Technology and Emerging Applications (EAI BlockTEA 2022), that will be held in October 20-21, 2022 in Copenhagen, Denmark. In this work, UBITECH’s Dr Thanassis Giannetsos (Head, Digital Security & Trusted Computing Research Group) and his co-authors from Delft University of Technology presents a prototype of a Hyperledger Fabric-IPFS based network architecture including a smart contract based encryption scheme that meant to improve the security of user’s data that is being up[1]loaded to the distributed ledger. A new extension to the self-encryption scheme was deployed by integrating data owner’s identity into the encryption process. Such integration allows to permanently preserve ownership of the original file and link it to the person/entity who originally uploaded it. Moreover, self-encryption provides strong security guarantees that decryption of a file is computationally not feasible under the condition that the encrypted file and the key are safely stored.
In particular, this paper aims at exploring trust and privacy preserving solutions in Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) blockchain. More specifically the goal is to further investigate the utility of a combination of identity based encryption and self-encryption as means of improving security of the data in the HLF; and implement ID-based self-encryption via Hyperledger Fabric smart contract. Hence the main research question is: ”How can security of Hyperledger Fabric smart contracts be improved using ID-based self-encryption?”
Within this paper an approach of integrating ID-based self-encryption is presented. Moreover a detailed description of prototype implementation is given. In addition to this implementation of ID-based self-encryption, a practical fully decentralized network architecture for storing encrypted data has also been deployed. In this proposed network, the data owner can use ID-based self-encryption to store encrypted data in a decentralized and secure manner. The encrypted data chunks are stored in an InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) which is a decentralized systems for file storage. To store the references (hash values) of the encrypted data chunks, the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain was used.
