A Scientific Data Integrity system based on Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper proposes a blockchain-based system to ensure data integrity and secure access in high-performance scientific data repositories, enabling reproducibility and validation across distributed research groups.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blockchain approach tailored for scientific data integrity, facilitating secure, verifiable, and easily extendable data management in HPC projects.

Findings

Prototype successfully tested with real scientific data

Ensures secure access and data integrity validation

Supports easy addition of new data records

Abstract

In most High Performance Computing (HPC) projects nowadays, there is a lot of data obtained from different sources, depending on the project's objectives. Some of that data is very huge in terms of size, so copying such data sometimes is an unrealistic goal. On the other hand, science requires data used for different purposes to remain unaltered, so different groups of researchers can reproduce results, discuss theories, and validate each other. In this paper, we present a novel approach to help research groups to validate data integrity on such distributed repositories using Blockchain. Originally developed for cryptographic currencies, Blockchain has demonstrated a versatile range of uses. Our proposal ensures 1) secure access to data management, 2) easy validation of data integrity, and 3) an easy way to add new records to the dataset with the same robust integrity policy. A prototype was developed and tested using a subset of a public dataset from a real scientific collaboration, the Latin American Giant Observatory (LAGO) Project.