SOK: Blockchain for Provenance (2407.17699v1)

Abstract: Provenance, which traces data from its creation to manipulation, is crucial for ensuring data integrity, reliability, and trustworthiness. It is valuable for single-user applications, collaboration within organizations, and across organizations. Blockchain technology has become a popular choice for implementing provenance due to its distributed, transparent, and immutable nature. Numerous studies on blockchain designs are specifically dedicated to provenance, and specialize in this area. Our goal is to provide a new perspective in blockchain based provenance field by identifying the challenges faced and suggesting future research directions. In this paper, we categorize the problem statement into three main research questions to investigate key issues comprehensively and propose a new outlook on the use of blockchains. The first focuses on challenges in non-collaborative, single-source environments, the second examines implications in collaborative environments and different domains such as supply chain, scientific collaboration and digital forensic, and the last one analyzes communication and data exchange challenges between organizations using different blockchains. The interconnected nature of these research questions ensures a thorough exploration of provenance requirements, leading to more effective and secure systems. After analyzing the requirements of provenance in different environments, we provide future design considerations for provenance-based blockchains, including blockchain type, query mechanisms, provenance capture methods, and domain-specific considerations. We also discuss future work and possible extensions in this field.