BCSolid: A Blockchain-Based Decentralized Data Storage and Authentication Scheme for Solid

Solid (Social Linked Data) aims to radically change the way web applications work today, giving users true data ownership and improved privacy. However, it is facing two challenges, one is that data in centralized repositories needs to be separated from social web applications that force users to share their information. In addition, a decentralized authentication that guarantees who can operate on user’s data with a secure privacy protection is another significant issue. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing a blockchain-based decentralized data storage and authentication scheme for Solid, termed BCSolid, in which a user’s data can be independent of multiple web applications and can switch data storage service easily without relying on a trusted third party. Meanwhile, our scheme gurantees data ownership and user’s privacy by leveraging the blockchain miners to perform authentication with the help of certificateless cryptography. Additionally, we present a possible instantiation to illustrate how “transactions” in BCSolid are processed. To our knowledge this is the first work to promote the Solid project using blockchain. The evaluation results show that our scheme can gurantee a low latency network and is a promising solution to Solid.