Abstract

Bridging isolated data islands is the very first step towards generating value from data. Traditional aggregation approaches are entangled in trust establishment, high operational cost, and lack of incentives for data sharing. The emerging blockchain technology has great potentials in addressing above pain points, owing to its strong guarantee of transparency and integrity. We recognize, however, that privacy and data quality are two essential goals that must be simultaneously achieved before the solution can be regulatorily-compliant and practically adopted.

Fig. 1: Trustworthy and Secure Data Aggregation Services on Blockchain Platforms

In this project, we target a blockchain-powered architecture with security protocols that allow screening out low-quality data, and aggregating useful ones, all in a privacy-preserving way. For practical use, we will tailor designs for three common data types: numeric, categorical, and textual. Based on them, we plan a comprehensive system prototyping, including one-stop management portal, blockchain smart contracts, trusted hardware module, etc., with extensive field testing. This project will bring significant benefits to HK society for its divergent and promising applications in real-life scenarios, including but not limited to public opinion polling, community governance with voting, and market research through surveying. Overall, it will pioneer and build strong technical foundation in making the entire HK society more efficient, fair, and confident.

Publication

• Xinyu Wang, Yuefeng Du, Cong Wang, Qian Wang, and Liming Fang, "WebEnclave: Protect Web Secrets from browser extensions with Software Enclave", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), in press, 2021.


• Huayi Duan, Yifeng Zheng, Yuefeng Du, Anxin Zhou, Cong Wang, and Man Ho Au, "Aggregating Crowd Wisdom via Blockchain: A Private, Correct, and Robust Realization", In IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom'19), Kyoto, Japan, March 11-15, 2019.

People