BCSM: A BlockChain-based Security Manager for Big Data

Abstract

The amount of data generated globally is increasing rapidly. This growth in big data poses security and privacy issues. Organizations that collect data from numerous sources could face legal or business consequences resulting from a security breach and the exposure of sensitive information. The traditional tools used for decades to handle, manage, and secure data are not suitable anymore in the case of big data. Furthermore, most of the current security tools rely on third-party services, which have numerous security problems. More research must investigate protecting user-sensitive information which can be abused and altered from several sides. Blockchain is a promising technology that provides decentralized backend infrastructure. Blockchain keeps track of transactions indefinitely and protects them from alteration. It provides a secure, tamper-proof database that may be used to track the past state of the system. In this paper, we present our big data security manager based on Hyperledger Fabric, which provides end-to-end big data security, including data storage, transmitting, and sharing as well as access control and auditing mechanisms. The manager components and modular architecture are illustrated. The metadata and permissions related to stored datasets are stored in the blockchain to be protected. Finally, we have tested the performance of our solution in terms of transaction throughput and average latency. The performance metrics are provided by Hyperledger Caliper, a benchmark tool for analyzing Hyperledger blockchain performance.