A Blockchain based approach for multimedia privacy protection and provenance

There has been a vast increase in incidents related to multimedia copyright and security breaches in the past few years, compromising users’ privacy. One such breach involved the seventh season of the TV series “Game of Thrones”, where episodes were illegally downloaded before the official release date etc. Such security breaches raise questions about the approaches and models that currently apply to data privacy and security, where the user saves and distributes his data personally or depends on a third party or stakeholder to manage the distribution rights of sensitive data. When it comes to multimedia, many companies or multimedia owners rely on third parties, distributors and sales persons to monitor their publicity, maintain their popularity and sell their multimedia content. Blockchain technology, which was originally devised for the digital currency (cryptocurrency), has distinct features such as distributed networking, data privacy, trust less computing etc. This technology attracts great interest from the research community due to its innovative properties which can be applied to many business applications, one being access control over data. In this paper, we present a decentralized data management framework that ensures user data privacy and control. We propose a protocol that uses blockchain technology to take control of the user’s data. This protocol enables the user to have full control over his multimedia files and he doesn’t need to trust a third party. The framework allows the user to not only store data but also to query and share data as well as auditing. Finally, we discuss possible future extensions of blockchain technology as a medium to ensure privacy, data control, auditing and trust management in different areas.