I recently started writing a series of posts that are EOS centric, my first post was about EOS platform itself, and it focuses on the explanation of the technology as well as talked a little about the founder and a few other things. Then I did a follow-up post on a project that was developed on the EOS platform, the name of the project is called SLANT. And today we will be looking at yet another EOS enable project.
Today’s project is about privacy computing platform known as privEOS, and it aims to solve the challenge of storing personal data for decentralized applications. It is a management solution that makes working with personal data easy for DAPP developers and its users.
The Problem
One of the cornerstones of the blockchain is its transparency, where everything is made publicly available for the readability of everyone, and this in its very nature possess a difficult challenge for dApps developers as the storage of personal data becomes very crucial. Date encryption is possible, but the real challenge is the management of this enormous of data, as once a data has been encrypted, it cannot be shared with new recipients.
Hitherto, no best practices have been created to solve this challenge, and with the recent creation of the Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union. This may have done nothing to increase the difficulty of compliance.
privEOS Privacy Solution for dApps
PrivEOS has a simple solution that allows decentralized applications store files in an encrypted way while maintaining the ability to grant reading rights to parties that are interested in the said data. This permission to access the said data is granted via the delegation of a smart contract which adopts the privEOS smart contract protocol.
privEOS provides a simple API that allows dApps store personal data in an encrypted way. A smart contract protocol is used to access the said file. The granting of reading permissions
to new users can happen both explicitly through user input (interactive case), as well as non-interactively. The non-interactive use-case is particularly powerful. The conditions under which a new user gets read access to a file are freely programmable. A smart contract could, for example, say that only users who have paid 5 EOS may access a file
The diagram at the right displays the splitting of a secret key into 5 pieces that will be stored on 5 different nodes. The key splitting algorithm can be configured to require any number of keys to be able to reconstruct the secret. For example, the platform can configure the algorithm to require a threshold number of 3 of the 5 key shares to be able to reconstruct the secret key. This ability makes our the previous network robust against lost keys as well as secure against single leaked keys.
There are other technicalities that can be found in the privEOS whitepaper listed in part of the references at the end of this post. The privEOS platform assures its users of secure computation where data are computed privately in a private and decentralized fashion, without any information leaked via middlemen.