  Cyber attacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated, introducing
significant challenges for organizations to protect their systems and data from
threat actors. Today, threat actors are highly motivated, persistent, and
well-founded and operate in a coordinated manner to commit a diversity of
attacks using various sophisticated tactics, techniques, and procedures. Given
the risks these threats present, it has become clear that organizations need to
collaborate and share cyber threat information (CTI) and use it to improve
their security posture. In this paper, we present TRADE -- TRusted Anonymous
Data Exchange -- a collaborative, distributed, trusted, and anonymized CTI
sharing platform based on blockchain technology. TRADE uses a blockchain-based
access control framework designed to provide essential features and
requirements to incentivize and encourage organizations to share threat
intelligence information. In TRADE, organizations can fully control their data
by defining sharing policies enforced by smart contracts used to control and
manage CTI sharing in the network. TRADE allows organizations to preserve their
anonymity while keeping organizations fully accountable for their action in the
network. Finally, TRADE can be easily integrated within existing threat
intelligence exchange protocols - such as trusted automated exchange of
intelligence information (TAXII) and OpenDXL, thereby allowing a fast and
smooth technology adaptation.
