[论文解读] Using Blockchain and smart contracts for secure data provenance management

Aravind Ramachandran, Murat Kantarcıoğlu|arXiv (Cornell University)|Sep 28, 2017

Blockchain Technology Applications and Security被引用 77

一句话总结

论文介绍 DataProv，这是一个基于区块链的框架，使用 Ethereum 智能合约和链外验证脚本来安全捕获、验证和管理数据溯源，同时保持隐私。它在现实世界场景中展示了固定成本的数据溯源记录和中等开销的安全性。

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.

研究动机与目标

• Address data provenance challenges in scientific research, including immutability, verifiability, and privacy of provenance data.
• Propose a distributed, incentivized system that logs provenance changes via smart contracts and a voting-based verification mechanism.
• Enable automated verification of provenance changes while avoiding leakage of sensitive data.
• Eliminate the need for trusted third parties by leveraging blockchain immutability and randomized voting for change validation.

提出的方法

• Model provenance with the Open Provenance Model (OPM) and represent it as triples of agent, artifact, and process.
• Implement an on-chain Document Tracker contract to manage access control and provenance events as log entries.
• Use a Vote contract to manage two voting schemes (majority and randomized threshold voting) to approve or reject provenance changes.
• Run verification scripts off-chain in the cloud to validate changes without exposing sensitive information on-chain.
• Store actual provenance events as blockchain log events to minimize on-chain storage costs.
• Provide an off-chain client module and a verification script that interact with Ethereum via local Geth nodes and cloud storage.

实验结果

研究问题

• RQ1 How can blockchain and smart contracts secure the collection, verification, and logging of data provenance in scientific workflows?
• RQ2 What voting mechanisms and incentive structures ensure honest provenance changes without leaking sensitive information?
• RQ3 How can provenance privacy be preserved while maintaining verifiability and availability in a distributed setting?
• RQ4 What are the performance and cost characteristics of a blockchain-based provenance system in real-world scenarios?

主要发现

• DataProv can securely capture provenance trails with immutable logging and automated verification.
• The system uses encrypted hashes and off-chain verification to protect sensitive data while recording provenance on-chain.
• Voting mechanisms (majority and randomized threshold) incentivize honesty and penalize invalid changes, with deposits redistributed to voters when errors are detected.
• The approach is implemented on Ethereum with a two-component architecture (on-chain contracts and off-chain clients) and is evaluated in real-world contexts (clinical drug trials and wheat production tracking).
• Experiments indicate DataProv achieves fixed costs for provenance operations and moderate overhead in the tested scenarios.
• The design avoids storing sensitive data on-chain by storing only metadata and proofs, while actual data remain off-chain in cloud storage.