BEng Computing, Imperial College London - 3rd Year Individual Project Report
Final year project submitted as part of BEng Computing studied at Imperial College London.
It is apparent that privacy of data (especially of a personal nature and especially in domains like health care) is one of the most important issues of modern times. A key ingredient that currently seems to be missing is the ability for the owner of a piece of data to provide "layered" access to it - so that - subject to rigorous authentication checks - different stakeholders get access to it at different levels of detail (e.g. your GP's receptionist might be able to see you have had an X-ray, but not the X-ray itself, while your GP gets to see everything). Perhaps blockchains are natural choices for storing the relevant permissions for data access - although perhaps not for the data itself.
The challenge for you would be to build a prototype blockchain-mediated data control system which allows such layered access to data. Researchers in the Centre for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering have a few ideas as to how such a scheme could be made to work; we would be happy to discuss them with you. If successful, this project has very high potential impact.
As written by William Knottenbelt