Consensus Protocols for Blockchain-based Data Provenance: Challenges and Opportunities

Blockchain has recently attracted tremendous interest due to its ability to enhance security and privacy through a immutable shared distributed ledger. Blockchain's ability to detect integrity violations are particularly key in providing assured data provenance in cloud platform. The practical adoption of blockchain will largely hinge on consensus protocols meeting performance and security guarantees. In this paper, we present the design issues for consensus protocols for blockchain based cloud provenance. We present the blockchain based data provenance framework for cloud. We find that there are performance and security challenges in adopting proof-of-work consensus protocol within this framework. We present unique design challenges and opportunities in developing proof-of-stake for data provenance in cloud platform.