A Fully Decentralized Data Usage Control Enforcement Infrastructure

Abstract. Distributed data usage control enables data owners to constrain how their data is used by remote entities. However, many data usage policies refer to events happening within several distributed systems, e.g. “at each point in time at most two clerks might have a local copy of this contract”, or “a contract must be approved by at least two clerks before it is sent to the customer”. While such policies can intuitively be enforced using a centralized infrastructure, major draw-backs are that such solutions constitute a single point of failure and that they are expected to cause heavy communication and performance overhead. Hence, we present the first fully decentralized infrastructure for the preventive enforcement of data usage policies. We provide a thorough evaluation of our infrastructure and show in which scenarios it is superior to a centralized approach.