CICI: UCSS: Enhancing Integrity and Confidentiality for Secure Distributed Data Sharing

The promised benefit of research data sharing lies in the ability to reuse the data. While many scientific disciplines are starting to share data, there are others who are restricted in the data they can share and with whom they can share. More and more interdisciplinary research and cross-institutional science collaborations are conducted on datasets that result from multiple funding sources with different constraints and policies and are stored in repositories that require specific metadata standards and formats and are subject to access restrictions.

Providing a secure method to efficiently share and verify the data and metadata while maintaining privacy restrictions becomes necessary for the reuse of the scientific data.

The Open Science Chain – Integrity Services (OSC-IS) strengthens cybersecurity controls with the application of blockchain technology primitives to preserve the integrity and the provenance of public and private data assets on research platforms and hubs. For private data assets, additional consideration of confidentiality exists, which may extend to fields in metadata.

OSC-IS leverages a combination of smart contracts and off-chain storage to ensure the data confidentiality and privacy in sharing private research data in collaborative research. The project creates an API-based data integrity verification management service for data-driven research platforms and hubs that will reduce data information loss and build support for managing various metadata standards and access controls.

The project enhances the security and trustworthiness in scientific data sharing that leads to increased usage in exploration and utilization of datasets within scientific communities. OSC-IS informs a wide array of different areas, including best practices in data management, demonstrating the use of blockchain in academic research, and incorporating computer security in education.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.