Permissionless Blockchains and Secure Logging
This is an incremental survey that addresses secure logging for applications needing tamper-proof records, but does not introduce new methods.
The paper surveys how permissionless blockchains can be used for secure logging, analyzing their properties like immutability and consensus to match logging requirements, and identifies research challenges and potential solutions.
The blockchain technology enables mutually untrusting participants to reach consensus on the state of a distributed and decentralized ledger (called a blockchain) in a permissionless setting. The consensus protocol of the blockchain imposes a unified view of the system state over the global network, and once a block is stable in the blockchain, its data is visible to all users and cannot be retrospectively modified or removed. Due to these properties, the blockchain technology is regarded as a general consensus infrastructure and based on which a variety of systems have been built. This article presents a study and survey of permissionless blockchain systems in the context of secure logging. We postulate the most essential properties required by a secure logging system and by considering a wide range of applications, we give insights into how the blockchain technology matches these requirements. Based on the survey, we motivate related research perspectives and challenges for blockchain-based secure logging systems, and we highlight potential solutions to some specific problems.