BEATS: Practical Audit Trail in Blockchain Systems
An audit trail records activities and tracks changes within a system, serving as a crucial tool for fraud prevention and data management. However, traditional audit trail systems often face inefficiencies, high costs, and vulnerability to security breaches and unauthorized access, limiting their rea...
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IEEE
2025-01-01
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| Series: | IEEE Access |
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| Online Access: | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11048856/ |
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| author | Bilal Alagha Ilker Ozcelik |
| author_facet | Bilal Alagha Ilker Ozcelik |
| author_sort | Bilal Alagha |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | An audit trail records activities and tracks changes within a system, serving as a crucial tool for fraud prevention and data management. However, traditional audit trail systems often face inefficiencies, high costs, and vulnerability to security breaches and unauthorized access, limiting their real-time fraud detection capabilities. These limitations highlight the need for more reliable, secure, and efficient solutions. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and immutable ledger, provides a promising solution. By providing tamper-proof, transparent, and real-time transaction records, blockchain enhances the reliability, efficiency, and security of audit trails, transforming auditing practices and boosting stakeholder trust. Despite these advantages, a significant challenge remains: as transaction volumes grow, retrieving and verifying specific information becomes increasingly time-consuming and resource-intensive. This problem, often overlooked in research, restricts the scalability and practicality of blockchain-based audit systems. To address these limitations, this study proposes BEATS (Blockchain-based Efficient Audit Trail System) - an efficient approach for verifying specific information within a blockchain. BEATS leverages a Cryptographic Accumulator, a compact data structure that accumulates transaction hashes, enabling auditors to verify transaction authenticity without exhaustive searches or supplementary systems. Our evaluation on the Sawtooth platform compared BEATS against linear transaction search, database-supported search, and platform-specific solutions. Results demonstrate that the RSA-based Cryptographic Accumulator significantly improves verification efficiency, achieving O(1) time and space complexity. This research shows that BEATS enhances the practicality and scalability of blockchain-based audit trail systems for large-scale applications, advancing blockchain technology adoption in domains that demand secure, efficient, and scalable audit solutions. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-7fa8bae967cd4d6d988ca5c55d2177f8 |
| institution | Kabale University |
| issn | 2169-3536 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2025-01-01 |
| publisher | IEEE |
| record_format | Article |
| series | IEEE Access |
| spelling | doaj-art-7fa8bae967cd4d6d988ca5c55d2177f82025-08-20T03:30:49ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362025-01-011310965710966910.1109/ACCESS.2025.358272211048856BEATS: Practical Audit Trail in Blockchain SystemsBilal Alagha0https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8347-1841Ilker Ozcelik1https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2032-1640Computer Engineering Department, Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Eskisehir, TürkiyeSoftware Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Eskisehir, TürkiyeAn audit trail records activities and tracks changes within a system, serving as a crucial tool for fraud prevention and data management. However, traditional audit trail systems often face inefficiencies, high costs, and vulnerability to security breaches and unauthorized access, limiting their real-time fraud detection capabilities. These limitations highlight the need for more reliable, secure, and efficient solutions. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized and immutable ledger, provides a promising solution. By providing tamper-proof, transparent, and real-time transaction records, blockchain enhances the reliability, efficiency, and security of audit trails, transforming auditing practices and boosting stakeholder trust. Despite these advantages, a significant challenge remains: as transaction volumes grow, retrieving and verifying specific information becomes increasingly time-consuming and resource-intensive. This problem, often overlooked in research, restricts the scalability and practicality of blockchain-based audit systems. To address these limitations, this study proposes BEATS (Blockchain-based Efficient Audit Trail System) - an efficient approach for verifying specific information within a blockchain. BEATS leverages a Cryptographic Accumulator, a compact data structure that accumulates transaction hashes, enabling auditors to verify transaction authenticity without exhaustive searches or supplementary systems. Our evaluation on the Sawtooth platform compared BEATS against linear transaction search, database-supported search, and platform-specific solutions. Results demonstrate that the RSA-based Cryptographic Accumulator significantly improves verification efficiency, achieving O(1) time and space complexity. This research shows that BEATS enhances the practicality and scalability of blockchain-based audit trail systems for large-scale applications, advancing blockchain technology adoption in domains that demand secure, efficient, and scalable audit solutions.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11048856/Audit trailblockchaincryptographic accumulatorefficiencyverification |
| spellingShingle | Bilal Alagha Ilker Ozcelik BEATS: Practical Audit Trail in Blockchain Systems IEEE Access Audit trail blockchain cryptographic accumulator efficiency verification |
| title | BEATS: Practical Audit Trail in Blockchain Systems |
| title_full | BEATS: Practical Audit Trail in Blockchain Systems |
| title_fullStr | BEATS: Practical Audit Trail in Blockchain Systems |
| title_full_unstemmed | BEATS: Practical Audit Trail in Blockchain Systems |
| title_short | BEATS: Practical Audit Trail in Blockchain Systems |
| title_sort | beats practical audit trail in blockchain systems |
| topic | Audit trail blockchain cryptographic accumulator efficiency verification |
| url | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11048856/ |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT bilalalagha beatspracticalaudittrailinblockchainsystems AT ilkerozcelik beatspracticalaudittrailinblockchainsystems |