Controllable and trustworthy blockchain-based cloud data management

In recent years, there have been efforts to deploy blockchain in a broad range of applications and in different domains, such as the critical infrastructure sectors. Generally, blockchain can be leveraged to establish a fair and transparent data sharing environment, where unauthorized modification to the data can be audited and traced. There are, however, known limitations of blockchain-based solutions, such as a significantly weakened networking control capability due to the distributed nature of such solutions. In addition, decisions recorded on a blockchain cannot be changed and there is the risk of majority attack (also known as 51% attack). Seeking to mitigate these limitations, in this paper we propose a controllable blockchain data management (CBDM) model that can be deployed in a cloud environment. We then evaluate its security and performance, in order to demonstrate utility. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.