A Blockchain-Enabled Framework for Storage and Retrieval of Social Data

2025-03-26

AI Summary

To address the challenges of secure storage and verifiable retrieval of heterogeneous social data originating from both trusted (e.g., governmental) and untrusted (e.g., crowdsourced) sources, this paper proposes the first lightweight blockchain-based access framework tailored for cross-trust-level data. Built upon Hyperledger Fabric, the framework integrates hash anchoring, permission-isolated storage, and verifiable provenance tracing to jointly ensure data integrity, origin accountability, and smart contract security. A customized chaincode enables fine-grained access control and end-to-end source traceability. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the framework’s feasibility in terms of storage efficiency and system scalability. This work establishes a foundational methodology and technical pathway toward building full-stack, trustworthy social data infrastructure.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

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.

Problem

• Secure storage and retrieval of social data from diverse sources
• Blockchain feasibility for trusted and untrusted data provenance
• Evaluating storage efficiency and scalability using Hyper Ledger Fabric

Innovation

• Blockchain-based secure data storage framework
• Hyper Ledger Fabric for efficiency evaluation
• Smart contracts ensure provenance and security