Permissive Blockchain Anchoring for Personal Data Integrity
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current blockchain technologies face challenges in ensuring non-repudiable, transparent ordering, replication, and logging of operations involving personal data, particularly in ensuring data immutability and persistence while adhering to data protection regulations, and in scaling operations per second.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that utilize a permissive blockchain with a separate storage system for personal information, employing a hashing algorithm and Merkle Trees to chain operations securely, allowing users to verify the integrity of their data and ensuring that only authorized actors can add new transactions, while also anchoring proofs in a secondary blockchain for enhanced scalability.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If personal data is anchored in a public blockchain to ensure immutability and persistence, then data integrity and non-repudiation are improved, but data privacy and compliance with data protection regulations deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments data into two parts: personal identifiable information (PII) is stored separately in secure storage systems, while only cryptographic hashes of the data are anchored in the public blockchain. This segmentation allows the blockchain to provide immutability guarantees without exposing actual personal data, thus maintaining both data integrity and privacy.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces cryptographic hashes as an intermediary between the original personal data and the public blockchain. These hashes serve as verifiable proxies that prove data existence and integrity without revealing the actual personal information, enabling third-party verification while protecting data privacy.
2Reliability
If all operations are recorded in the blockchain to ensure transparency and non-repudiation, then accountability is improved, but the right to forget and data deletion capabilities deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent separates the permanent immutable record (cryptographic hashes in blockchain) from the mutable personal data (stored in secure storage systems). This allows the system to maintain accountability through the immutable hash records while enabling data deletion from the storage systems, thus satisfying both GDPR right to forget and accountability requirements.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates cryptographic hash copies of personal data and anchors these copies in the blockchain. The original personal data can be deleted from storage systems when required, while the hash copies remain in the blockchain to provide permanent verification of data existence and integrity, enabling both deletion and accountability.
3Reliability
If cryptographic proofs are anchored for every operation to ensure non-repudiation, then transparency is improved, but the number of operations per second and scalability deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple individual operation proofs into batched proofs or uses cryptographic accumulators to represent multiple operations. Instead of anchoring separate cryptographic proofs for each operation, the system combines them into fewer, more efficient proofs that can be verified without processing each individual operation separately, thus improving throughput while maintaining non-repudiation.
4Ease of operation
If a permissioned blockchain is used to control who can write operations, then data access control is improved, but decentralization and transparency deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the blockchain system into a permissioned layer (for controlled data submission and hash generation) and a public layer (for immutable anchor storage). The permissioned portion controls who can submit operations and generate hashes, while the public blockchain provides decentralized verification and storage of these hashes, combining access control with decentralization.
Data Source
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AI summary
A method, system and computer programs for not repudiable transparent ordering, replication and logging of operations involving personal data are disclosed. The method comprises performing, by a user via a computing device, an operation using a data controller computing node, said data controller computing node having writing authorization on a first blockchain, the first blockchain being a permissive blockchain; storing, by the data controller computing node, personal information of the user in a storage system separate from the first blockchain; and anchoring, by the data controller computing node, a cryptographic proof of said operation in said first blockchain using a hashing algorithm that chains the operation to a previous operation performed by said user, the cryptographic proof being anchored together with a cryptographic string of a certain length.