SciBlock: A Blockchain-Based Tamper-Proof Non-Repudiable Storage for Scientific Workflow Provenance

Abstract

Modern scientific workflow systems lack strong support for protecting the scientific data and their provenance from being forged or altered. As a result, scientists may be misled into believing that they have found a specific result, but only to discover later that the data they used have been altered and should not be trusted. To address this limitation, we develop a new system called SciBlock that leverages recent advances in blockchain technology to provide a tamper-proof and non-repudiable storage for scientific workflow provenance. SciBlock provides primitives that allow users to query scientific workflow provenance data efficiently. Moreover, SciBlock offers the capability of invalidating wrong or outdated scientific workflow provenance data without removing them from the blockchain. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the performance and scalability of SciBlock. Our experimental results show that SciBlock offers a promising approach to enhancing scientific research integrity in a distributed collaborative environment.