AUDITEM: Toward an Automated and Efficient Data Integrity Verification Model Using Blockchain

Abstract: Data tampering is often considered a severe problem in industrial applications as it can lead to inaccurate financial reports or even a corporate security crisis. A correct representation of data is essential for companies' core business processes and is demanded by investors and customers. Traditional data audits are performed through third-party auditing services; however, these services are expensive and can be untrustworthy in some cases. Blockchain and smart contracts provide a decentralized mechanism to achieve secure and trustworthy data integrity verification; however, existing solutions present challenges in terms of scalability, privacy protection, and compliance with data regulations. In this paper, we propose the AUtomated and Decentralized InTegrity vErification Model (AUDITEM) to assist business stakeholders in verifying data integrity in a trustworthy and automated manner. To address the challenges in existing integrity verification processes, our model uses carefully designed smart contracts and a distributed file system to store integrity verification attributes and uses blockchain to enhance the authenticity of data certificates. A sub-module called Data Integrity Verification Tool (DIVT) is also developed to support easy-to-use interfaces and customizable verification operations. This paper presents a detailed implementation and designs experiments to verify the proposed model. The experimental and analytical results demonstrate that our model is feasible and efficient to meet various business requirements for data integrity verification.