An Auditable and Secure Model for Permissioned Blockchain

Abstract

The intrinsic tamper-resistant characteristic of blockchain enables transaction to be permanently stored as immutable record, which provides extremely reliable information traceability for some application scenarios such as supply chain and copyright protection. However, in fact, even the Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus algorithm cannot fundamentally guarantee that transaction information is real and legitimate in reality. Therefore, the normal operation of the blockchain system requires the establishment of a special supervisory body to audit the transaction information, which can ensure that the data sources are credible rather than spurious or illegal. In addition, in the environment of permissioned blockchain, the realization of access mechanism often relies on centralized certificate authority. Unfortunately, a highly centralized management entity is not entirely trustworthy and reliable because it may be corrupt or attacked, which inevitably triggers many information security incidents such as privacy leakage and data loss. In order to realize the secure governance of permissioned blockchain system, a novel multi-supervised permissioned blockchain (MSPB) model is proposed in this paper, which supports auditing and eliminates the centralized entities in the system, including certification authority and auditing authority. We evaluated the security and performance of the proposed model to demonstrate its feasibility, reliability and effectiveness.