Abstract
With the rise of digital images in our daily lives, there is a growing need to provide an image trading market where people can monetize their images and get desired images at prices that fit their budget. Those images are usually uploaded and stored onto centralized image trading service providers’ servers and the transactions for image trading are processed by these providers. Unfortunately, transaction unfairness and users’ privacy breaches have become major concerns since the service providers might be untrusted and able to manipulate image trading prices and infer users’ private information. Recently, several approaches have been proposed to address the unfairness issue by using the decentralized ledger technique and smart contract, but users’ privacy protection is not considered. In this paper, we propose a fair and privacy-preserving protocol that supports image fair exchange and protect user privacy. In particular, we exploit blockchain and Merkle tree to construct a fair image trading protocol with low communication overhead based on smart contract, which serves as an external judge that resolves disputes between buyers and sellers in image transactions. Moreover, we extend a popular short group signature scheme to protect users’ identity privacy, prevent linkability of transactions from being inferred, and ensure traceability of malicious users who may sell fake images and/or refuse to pay. Finally, we design and build a practical and open-source image trading system to evaluate the performance of our proposed protocol. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency in real-world applications.
Highlights
Digital imaging devices such as digital cameras are becoming more integrated in our lives
E fairness of image transaction in the image trading service providers (ITSP), is subject to skepticism and scrutiny, as user’s images are stored in the ITSP’s servers and all transactions are completed via the ITSP, who waits to receive money from buyers and images from sellers and only executes the exchange based on the hash computation [5]
We propose to build a practical image trading system that can provide guarantee on achieving both fairness and privacy protection in an image trading process. e major contributions of this paper are summarized as follows: (i) Fairness in trading is achieved by a fair image trading protocol that is constructed by utilizing blockchain and Merkle tree
Summary
Digital imaging devices such as digital cameras are becoming more integrated in our lives. In order to complete image transactions more efficiently and conveniently, ITSPs usually requires users to submit their identity information, including phone numbers, e-mail addresses, bank card numbers, and home addresses, for various purposes, such as taxation Once these data are sent and stored on the ITSP’s server, users will lose control of their data, leading their private. Zhao et al designed an image network copyright transaction protection approach based on blockchain technology [8] so that the entire copyright transaction process is protected and the attribute identification of image content is identified These works only consider solving the fairness issue, while addressing the privacy issue at the same time remains to be an open problem.
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