Paper 2025/2034

MtDB: A Decentralized Multi-Tenant Database for Secure Data Sharing

Wenyi Tang, University of Notre Dame

Changhao Chenli, Indiana Institute of Technology

Haijian Sun, University of Georgia

WenZhan Song, University of Georgia

Seokki Lee, University of Cincinnati

Mic Bowman, Intel Corporation

Taeho Jung, University of Notre Dame

Abstract

Healthcare data sharing is fundamental for advancing medical research and enhancing patient care, yet it faces significant challenges in privacy, data ownership, and interoperability due to fragmented data silos across institutions and strict regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA). To bridge these gaps, we propose MtDB, a novel decentralized database architecture addressing secure data sharing in multi-tenant database ecosystems. MtDB employs blockchain for metadata coordination and sharing, IPFS for distributed data addressing, a universal SQL query interface for data access, and Intel SGX for integrity-protected query execution with enforced access control. We provide an open-source implementation demonstrating MtDB’s capabilities for secure, patient-centric healthcare data sharing while preserving ownership and enforcing policies. Experimental results show MtDB achieves 35 milliseconds query latency for indexed queries over 400M multi-tenant medical records while maintaining cryptographic security guarantees, with only 1.2–1.3× performance overhead compared to non-secure baselines.

Note: Accepted and presented at IEEE Blockchain 2025

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/2034,
author = {Showkot Hossain and Wenyi Tang and Changhao Chenli and Haijian Sun and WenZhan Song and Seokki Lee and Mic Bowman and Taeho Jung},
title = {{MtDB}: A Decentralized Multi-Tenant Database for Secure Data Sharing},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/2034},
year = {2025},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/2034}
}