Data provenance is an important topic in domains where loosely coupled services work together to perform complex tasks. Data provenance allows us to reproduce results and to establish trust into the data presented by those services. One of the biggest problems of trustful data provenance is that a centralised component has to be used and, more importantly, trusted. This trust often goes beyond the component itself and involves managing users of this component. Bitcoin is able to realise spending money in a trusted and distributed way by using a decentralised ledger, the blockchain. In this thesis, we will investigate the possibilities of using the blockchain to solve the problems of data provenance in a decentralised and trusted manner. As a result, we will implement a prototype of a corresponding framework.
Decentralised Data Provenance based on the Blockchain
Prototype implementation of provenance networks for the Ethereum chain.