OWL: A data sharing scheme with controllable anonymity and integrity for group users

Abstract

As our society becomes digital and communication technology develops, global collaboration is an inevitable trend, where data-sharing is a critical component of cooperation across organizations. Identity privacy and data integrity are vital issues in data-sharing. Existing works struggle to address these problems simultaneously, either privacy leaking or privacy abuse. In this work, we proposed OWL, a data-sharing scheme that (1) provides users on-demand anonymity and (2) allows users to verify data integrity while preserving anonymity. To achieve (1) OWL enables controllable anonymity that allows de-anonymity for the malicious while keeping anonymity to the honest providers based on traceable ring signature technology. To achieve (2), OWL designs a data integrity auditing scheme that uses vector commitment to verify data integrity without privacy leakage. Furthermore, OWL employs the blockchain to store immutable auxiliary information for the integrity and controllable anonymity. We also employ the state channel to resolve the performance bottleneck of blockchain and design methods to improve the usage of the state channel for group users. We prove that OWL achieves controllable anonymity and integrity. Finally, we implement the experiment to evaluate the efficiency of OWL.