A Peer-to-Peer Ownership-Preserving Data Marketplace

A data marketplace enables trading among those who expect to monetize their data and those interested in gaining insights from it. Unfortunately, the paradigm that drives current marketplaces suffers from data leakage: one who buys data can, in principle, resell the acquired data as many times as he wants, even despising non-disclosure agreements. This work proposes a data marketplace, which allows to sell data that can be computed, though not unveiled. First, an owner provides encrypted data to a buyer, who can perform arbitrary operations on this encrypted data as if it were regular data. Thanks to homomorphic encryption, the encrypted results obtained in the buyer-side can then be decrypted in the seller-side, in a second and definitive data exchange. A smart contract is in charge of registering each step of the transaction to guarantee a safe exchange for the two parties involved.