GeoBlocks: Trustless Geospatial Data Sharing with Accountability and Decentralized Access Control

Multi-organizational geospatial cloud infrastructures often require data sharing across different hierarchies to support geospatial development, decision-making, and collaborative initiatives. Existing Geospatial data exchange techniques rely on point-to-point communications between siloed GeoServers. As a result, selective data exchange within a large pool of participants is not possible where there may exist untrustworthy parties that can cause harm by illegitimately obtaining or sharing sensitive data. To address such challenges, we propose a reliable open-source permission-based blockchain platform, called GeoBlocks, designed explicitly for geospatial data, which stores and enforces Access Control Lists (ACLs), while an application layer facilitates inbound requests from one GeoServer to another based on the ACL. Access control rights are established through individual agreements between organizations and recorded on the blockchain ledger using smart contract transactions. In addition, GeoBlocks supports a dynamic programmable dispute resolution mechanism based on the ACL rights. We develop and evaluate GeoBlocks with a proof of concept implementation and show that GeoBlocks has minimal latency overhead for query processing under different scenarios.