Using Distributed Ledger to Preserve Log Integrity

The interest in the distributed ledger technology is mostly started from the successful blockchain-based cryptocurrencies that store collections of transactions for novel electronic payment methods. After these applications, the concept of distributed ledger technology has been growing up into various applications which do not only contain transactions in case of cryptocurrency field, but they also store other valuable information on different topics. Actually, the concept of natural ledgers to record exchange assets started a long time ago; however, with the development of information technology and the Internet, these ledgers are become distributed ledgers by shifting to distributed networks in which valuable data is distributed and synchronously stored between participants with securely cryptographic algorithms to gain decentralized and trustworthy characteristics. With the beneficial advantages of the technology, this thesis investigates an adoption of distributed ledger technology in a logging system. Since event logs are crucial evidence for incident handling and response, the logging system is the first target of experienced attackers to erase the trace of their attacks. To prevent adversaries attacks, the logging system strictly requires the decentralization, integrity and trustworthiness of event logs. Therefore, the usage of distributed ledger technology awaits as a novel efficient approach to erect the logging systems. Due to the requirements of logging systems which are the swift validation and permission of perusal in event logs, the thesis has investigated the adoption of the XRP ledger which is a permissioned distributed ledger with the low time-consuming in rounds of the consensus process. Particularly, XRP ledger's consensus procedure is a federal algorithm, each peer in the network needs to trust certain other nodes to ask verification of correct event logs and new ledgers. With this construction of the logging system, the scalability is considered in experiments to understand the number of event logs and ledgers which can be processed and dealt with this system in a short time