AuditTrust: Blockchain-Based Audit Trail for Sharing Data in a Distributed Environment

There has been a significant recent interest in trust-building technologies for decentralized environments, especially for sharing data between mutually distrusting entities. One of the critical challenges in this context is to ensure that shared data cannot be tampered with, and that access to this data can always be traced and audited in a secure and trustworthy way, e.g., by using an access log to detect tampering. However, for audit trail data to be useful, it must be correct, immutable, and tied with access control mechanisms. We present AuditTrust, a blockchain-based secure audit trail for data sharing in a distributed environment. We prototype AuditTrust using several technologies, such as Hyperledger Besu, IPFS, the Intel SGX TEE, and Vault. Our evaluation of AuditTrust examines the latency costs of auditing and access control and shows the effectiveness of the approach