A Blockchain-Enabled Secure Searchable-Encryption-based Data Transaction Protocol

With the development of artificial intelligence and big data, data has become an important part of production factors, and the sharing and transaction of data have a very high importance. Through the storage service of the cloud data transaction platform, users can send data to the cloud platform remotely, and flexibly access and transmit data through the Internet anytime and anywhere. However, this approach faces growing data security concerns. When users transmit data to the cloud, they will not have full control over their data. Data stored in the cloud may be altered, deleted, leaked, or misappropriated, especially in public cloud environments. Many current data transaction platforms simply adopt a decentralized model to avoid this problem, but still perform poorly in the face of massive transaction scenarios. In addition, when the data demander receives the required data, there is the problem of denying the transaction, which challenges the availability of the data transaction platform and affects the trust of the data transaction participants in the transaction platform. This paper proposes a secure searchable-encryption-based data transaction protocol (SDTP) utilizing blockchain technology and searchable encryption. In the proposed protocol, the transaction platform does not gain access to the provider’s raw data, and the data provider has all decisionmaking rights over the data. The data demander can search for the target encrypted data using only keywords before receiving the original data authorized by the data provider. In addition, blockchain technology, with its decentralized and tamper-proof characteristics, has made important contributions to the transformation of traditional centralized data transaction platforms, and the entire data transaction process is recorded on the blockchain, effectively preventing problems such as demander denial and data tampering. In this paper, a formal verification tool is used to ensure that the proposed protocol meets the ideal security standard expected by the secure data transaction protocol, and the security of the protocol against attacks is proved from the perspective of non-formal theoretical analysis.