BlockTrail: A Scalable Multichain Solution for Blockchain-Based Audit Trails

Abstract

Blockchain-based audit trails provide a consensus-driven and tamper-proof trail of system events that are helpful in creating provenance in enterprise solutions. However, taking into account the transaction bulk generated by these applications and the throughput limitations of existing blockchains, a single ledger for record keeping can be inefficient and costly. To that end, we see an imperative need for a new blockchain design that is capable of addressing current challenges, without compromising security and provenance. Hence, we propose BlockTrail, a scalable and efficient blockchain solution for auditing applications. BlockTrail fragments the legacy blockchain systems into layers of co-dependent hierarchies, thereby reducing the time and space complexity, and increasing the throughput. BlockTrail is prototyped on "Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance" (PBFT) protocol with a custom-built blockchain. Experiments with BlockTrail show that compared to the conventional schemes, BlockTrail is more efficient, and has less storage footprint.