HES: An Effective Homomorphic Encryption-Based Scheme for Data Quality Verification in Data Trading

The digital economy is one of the most dynamic, fastest growing, and impactful domains in modern economic development. To fully exploit the potential value of data as an economic resource, many governments have implemented policies to encourage and regulate data circulation and trade. Despite the increasing adoption of blockchain-based data trading platforms, a significant challenge persists: verifying data quality without compromising privacy. This deficiency reduces data utilization efficiency and limits its economic potential We propose HES, a decentralized scheme for data quality verification in transactions, which integrates homomorphic encryption, blockchain, and zero-knowledge proofs to balance privacy and verifiability. The proposed method introduces data meta-certificates to represent the original data and employs cryptographic methods to enable zero-knowledge verification. This mechanism supports the verification of both data content and quality while preserving privacy. Data buyers can verify datasets without accessing specific content or involving third-party intermediaries. In this decentralized framework, data buyers can independently verify whether a dataset meets their requirements based solely on its content and quality indicators. Our experiments show that the proposed approach solves the challenge of reaching data quality consensus in distributed scenarios, enabling data buyers and sellers to swiftly align on quality standards. This facilitates the secure circulation and trade of data assets while unlocking their economic value. The findings offer a robust, privacy-preserving consensus mechanism for evaluating data quality in transactions.