Towards Big Data Security Framework by Leveraging Fragmentation and Blockchain Technology

Abstract

The world is facing a growth in the amount and variety of data generated by both users and machines. Despite the exponential increases, the tools and technologies developed to manage these data volumes are not intended to meet security and data protection requirements. Additionally, most of the current big data security systems are offered by a centralized third party, which is vulnerable to many security threats. Blockchain technology plays a significant role by addressing modern technology concerns such as decentralization, non-tampering, trust, data ownership, and traceability, making it great potential to protect personal information. This research presents a new big data security solution empowered by blockchain technology and incorporates fragmentation, encryption, and access control techniques. Our proposed fragmentation algorithm takes into account the data owner’s demand for encryption to be added to the fragmentation process. Furthermore, data fragments will be stored in the distributed manner offered by the big data environment, resulting in an additional layer of data protection. In order to achieve an optimal security solution, we aim to enhance big data security with acceptable overhead and avoid the encryption overhead for non-sensitive and low-sensitive data portions. We present the results of our implemented techniques to highlight that the overheads (in terms of computation time) introduced by our solution are negligible relative to its security and privacy gains.