Towards Distributed Trustworthy Traceability and Accountability

Abstract

Digital traces play an increasingly important role in our society. Whether in the context of regulatory compliance, contractual exchanges or simply for general interactions, people need to be able to document trustworthy facts. Most approaches today rely either on Trusted Third Parties, at best, or more generally on collecting such traces after problems occur in ways where their authenticity may be arguable (fabricated, doctored). Blockchain technology offers an interesting alternative to the problem by allowing documenting transactions in a distributed consensus ledger with transparency and immutability properties. This paper proposes a new approach to the problem leveraging blockchain technology towards providing a framework for distributed trustworthy logging of digital facts and traces on the blockchain as they happen or are needed before problems arise. Disintermediation of such processes is likely to significantly help raise trust and accountability in many aspects of our interactions, whether online or offline.