Permissionless Blockchains and Secure Logging

TL;DR

This paper surveys permissionless blockchain systems, analyzing their suitability for secure logging by examining essential properties, applications, challenges, and potential solutions in this domain.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of how blockchain technology can meet secure logging requirements and discusses future research directions and challenges.

Findings

Blockchain offers tamper-evidence for logs.

Many blockchain systems meet core secure logging properties.

Challenges include scalability and privacy concerns.

Abstract

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.