ERSChain: Towards secure and flexible educational resource sharing using consortium blockchain and revocable ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption

Sharing high-quality educational resources has become an effective way to promote educational equity. The traditional educational resource sharing platforms using centralized storage architecture have security issues. Recently, many studies use blockchain to achieve secure sharing of educational resources. However, the existing blockchain-based educational resource sharing schemes only use blockchain as a storage tool, and have issues such as low sharing efficiency, without considering copyright security, and lack of a trusted sharing environment, which prevents the large-scale sharing of educational resources. In response, we propose ERSChain, a novel blockchain-based educational resources sharing solution. First, we put forward a hybrid storage method that keeps the hash value of resource in the blockchain and stores the encrypted resource in the off-chain, which can alleviate the storage and computing pressure brought by massive educational resources while ensuring the integrity of resources. Second, we construct an efficient revocable ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption algorithm to implement flexible access control and an outsourced decryption algorithm to achieve greater efficiency. Obtaining access to educational resources is possible when user's attributes meet the access policy and the user's identity does not exist in the revocation list. Third, we put forward a credit mechanism to adjust the user's credibility and a credit-based consensus mechanism to maintain the trusted sharing environment. Finally, security analysis and plentiful of experiments demonstrate that our proposed ERSChain achieves security assurance, has better applicability than similar works, and enables large-scale sharing of educational resources.