Date of Award
Spring 2020
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Computer Science
First Advisor
Perouli, Debbie
Second Advisor
Ahamed, Iqbal
Third Advisor
Brylow, Dennis
Abstract
Policies and regulations, such as the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR), have been enforced to protect personal data from abuse during storage and processing. We design and implement a prototype scheme that could 1) provide a public ledger of policy compliance to help the public make informative decisions when choosing data services; 2) provide support to the organizations for identifying violations and improve their ability of compliance. Honest organizations could then benefit from their positive records on the public ledger. To address the scalability problem inherent in the Blockchain-based systems, we develop algorithms and leverage state channels to implement an on-chain-hash-off-chain data structure. We identify the verification of the information from the external world as a critical problem when using Blockchains as public ledgers, and address this problem by the incentive-based trust model implied by state channels. We propose the Verifiable Off-Chain Message Channel as the integrated solution for leveraging blockchain technology as a general-purpose recording mechanism and support our thesis with performance experiments. Finally, we suggest a sticky policy mechanism as the evidence source for the public ledger to monitor cross-boundary policy compliance.