A decentralized document management system using blockchain and secret sharing

Abstract

© 2021 Owner/Author.The use of digital documents is exploding around the world due to high productivity and convenience. However, the digital documents have some security issues. For example, when a user who has the permission behaves maliciously for his/her benefit, the digital document can be easily falsified. In this paper, we propose a decentralized document management system (DDMS) to improve security of a digital document. DDMS first distributes access permission to multiple users for higher security of the document. To do this, DDMS encrypts a document via a symmetric key and splits the key via a Shamir's secret sharing scheme. And, DDMS manages each split keys using blockchian and reconstructs the complete symmetric key when the document is retrieved via a devised smart contract. We implement DDMS based on Ethereum blockchain. The experimental results show that the proposed DDMS can provide higher security with a reasonable performance overhead compared with other three types of DMSs.