Achieving Decentralized Authority for Collaborative Data Sharing with Consensus

In the age of globalization and international collaboration, collaborative data sharing is crucial for computer-aided research. There is a growing demand for spontaneous, short-lived, and fine-grained collaboration acts that could be satisfied by a decentralized platform for the management of entities (users, groups, datasets). Our research is based on a pre-existing concept of such a decentralized platform, called the decentralized entity persistence layer (DEPL). We describe a novel architecture extending DEPL, called DEPL-DA, which introduces an idea of decentralized authority, allowing entities to be managed collectively by multiple organizations, at the same time ensuring fault tolerance and improving availability. Our proposal utilizes a synergy between consensus and atomic commitment protocols (AC&C) providing decentralization of authority over entities, at the same time providing means to perform atomic modifications of entities spanning across multiple authoritative domains. We propose two approaches to the integration of AC&C: competitive and cooperative, and implement them based on several existing AC&C protocols. The evaluation shows the differences between approaches and protocols used, as well as the fact that both approaches are viable and offer latencies acceptable by operations related to entity management.