RCDS: a right-confirmable data-sharing model based on symbol mapping coding and blockchain

The problem of data right confirmation is a long-term bottleneck in data sharing. Existing methods for confirming data rights lack credibility owing to poor supervision, and work only with specific data types because of their technical limitations. The emergence of blockchain is followed by some new data-sharing models that may provide improved data security. However, few of these models perform well enough in confirming data rights because the data access could not be fully under the control of the blockchain facility. In view of this, we propose a right-confirmable data-sharing model named RCDS that features symbol mapping coding (SMC) and blockchain. With SMC, each party encodes its digital identity into the byte sequence of the shared data by generating a unique symbol mapping table, whereby declaration of data rights can be content-independent for any type and any volume of data. With blockchain, all data-sharing participants jointly supervise the delivery and the access to shared data, so that granting of data rights can be openly verified. The evaluation results show that RCDS is effective and practical in data-sharing applications that are conscientious about data right confirmation.