Selective Encryption for Owners’ Control in Digital Data Markets

A recent solution for permitting data owners to make their data selectively available on digital market platforms combines the adoption of selective owner-side encryption and smart contracts deployed on blockchains. Selective encryption, coupled with key derivation techniques to reduce key management burden, guarantees that only subjects who are authorized for a resource can read its content. Smart contracts permit to regulate the interactions among the interested subjects, the possible economic incentives to be paid to the owners as expected in markets, and the information needed to decrypt resource (i.e., the updates to the structure used for managing key derivation) upon payment. In this paper, we investigate different approaches for managing and updating the key derivation structure to enable selective data sharing on digital data markets, while limiting access times to resources and the cost of operations on the blockchain.