Validating Data Integrity with Blockchain

Data manipulation is often named as a serious threat to data integrity. Data can be tampered with, and malicious actors could use this to their advantage. Data users in various application domains want to be ensured that the data they are consuming are accurate and have not been tampered with. To validate the integrity of these data, we describe a blockchain-based hash validation method. The method assumes that the actual data is stored separately from the blockchain, and then allows a data identifier and a hash of these data to be submitted to the blockchain. The actual data can be validated against the hash on the blockchain at any time. Several use cases are described for blockchain-based hash validation, and to validate the method it is implemented inside an application audit trail to validate the audit trail data. This implementation shows that blockchain-based hash validation is able to detect malicious and accidental changes that were made to the data.

I. Introduction

US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper stated that the next big cyber threat is data manipulation [1] and technology magazine Wired listed it as one of the biggest security threats in 2016 [2].