Using Blockchain and smart contracts for secure data provenance management

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain-based framework utilizing smart contracts and the open provenance model to securely and immutably manage scientific data provenance, ensuring trustworthy verification and preventing malicious modifications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blockchain-enabled system for secure, automatic verification of scientific data provenance records using smart contracts and open provenance model.

Findings

Efficient and secure capture of provenance data

Prevents malicious modifications with majority honesty assumption

Demonstrates practical applicability of blockchain for data provenance

Abstract

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.