Using Blockchain and smart contracts for secure data provenance management
This work addresses the need for trustworthy data provenance management in scientific domains, though it is incremental as it applies existing blockchain technology to a specific application area.
The authors tackled the problem of ensuring secure and immutable scientific data provenance by developing a framework that uses blockchain and smart contracts to automatically verify provenance records, demonstrating that it can efficiently capture and validate data while preventing malicious modifications under honest majority conditions.
Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of transactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive the environment for building distributed reliable applications. Although, blockchain technology has been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the previous work focused on using blockchain to develop a secure and immutable scientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the provenance records. In this work, we leverage blockchain as a platform to facilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and management. The developed system utilizes smart contracts and open provenance model (OPM) to record immutable data trails. We show that our proposed framework can efficiently and securely capture and validate provenance data, and prevent any malicious modification to the captured data as long as the majority of the participants are honest.