A blockchain-based efficient audit trail framework

An audit trail records activities and tracks changes within a system, serving as a crucial tool for fraud prevention and data management. However, traditional audit trail systems often suffer from inefficiencies, high costs, and vulnerability to security breaches and unauthorized access, limiting their effectiveness in real-time fraud detection. These limitations highlight the urgent need for more reliable, secure, and efficient solutions. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and immutable ledger, provides a promising solution. By offering tamper-proof, transparent, and real-time transaction records, blockchain significantly enhances the reliability, efficiency, and security of audit trails, revolutionizing auditing practices and increasing stakeholder trust. Despite these advantages, a significant challenge remains: as the volume of transactions increases, retrieving and verifying specific information becomes increasingly time-consuming and resource-intensive. This issue, often overlooked in research, limits the scalability and practicality of blockchain-based audit systems in real-world applications. This thesis focuses on developing an efficient approach for verifying specific information within a blockchain, addressing the limitations of searchability and scalability in current audit trail systems. The proposed approach introduces the Cryptographic Accumulator as a novel solution to these challenges. By accumulating all transaction hashes into a compact data structure, the cryptographic accumulator enables auditors to verify transaction authenticity without exhaustive searches or supplementary systems. Our study evaluated this approach on the Sawtooth platform, comparing its performance against linear transaction search in blockchain, database-supported transaction search in blockchain, and blockchain platform-specific solutions. Test results prove that RSA-based cryptographic accumulator significantly enhances audit trail information verification efficiency with O(1) time and space complexity, making blockchain-based audit trail systems more practical and scalable for large-scale applications. This research contributes to the advancement of blockchain technology, paving the way for its adoption in domains requiring secure, efficient, and scalable audit solutions.