Querying the Data Provenance from Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

The potentiality of Blockchain technology is widespread and applied to diverse fields. Blockchain is a distributed ledger of transactions that store immutable records in chronological order in an append-only mode. Hence, humongous data is stored on the blockchain and will continuously expand over time. Blockchain has been rapidly adopted by many businesses for storing the provenance data because of its salient features like immutability, robustness and tamperproof. Blockchain stores data provenance as transactions that are collected from sources like a centralized cloud or decentralized cloud that helps in identifying cybercrimes. This paper emphasizes on the different approaches of querying the data provenance transactions stored in Ethereum Blockchain based on various search parameters using REST API web services. The approach not only queries based on the first-class data elements like blocks, transactions, account address and contract address but also queries based on the provenance data stored on the Ethereum Blockchain explained with a use case LegalProv.