Immutable Log Storage as a Service on Private and Public Blockchains

Service Level Agreements (SLA) are employed to ensure the performance of Cloud solutions. When a component fails, the importance of logs increases significantly. All departments may turn to logs to determine the cause of the issue and find the party at fault. The party at fault may be motivated to t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on services computing 2023-01, Vol.16 (1), p.356-369
Main Authors: Pourmajidi, William, Zhang, Lei, Steinbacher, John, Erwin, Tony, Miranskyy, Andriy
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Blockchain
Blockchains
Cloud computing
cloud monitoring
Consensus algorithm
Cost analysis
Cryptography
immutable storage
log storage
log verification
Monitoring
Privacy
Quality of service
Scalability
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Service Level Agreements (SLA) are employed to ensure the performance of Cloud solutions. When a component fails, the importance of logs increases significantly. All departments may turn to logs to determine the cause of the issue and find the party at fault. The party at fault may be motivated to tamper with the logs to hide their role. We argue that the critical nature of Cloud logs calls for immutability and verification mechanism without the presence of a single trusted party. This article proposes such a mechanism by describing a blockchain-based log storage system, called Logchain, which can be integrated with existing private and public blockchain solutions. Logchain uses the immutability feature of blockchain to provide a tamper-resistance platform for log storage. Additionally, we propose a hierarchical structure to address blockchains' scalability issues. To validate the mechanism, we integrate Logchain into Ethereum and IBM Blockchain. We show that the solution is scalable and perform the analysis of the cost of ownership to help a reader select an implementation that would address their needs. The Logchain's scalability improvement on a blockchain is achieved without any alteration of blockchains' fundamental architecture. As shown in this work, it can function on private and public blockchains and, therefore, can be a suitable alternative for organizations that need a secure, immutable log storage platform.
ISSN:1939-1374
2372-0204
DOI:10.1109/TSC.2021.3120690