DIV-SC: A Data Integrity Verification Scheme for Centralized Database Using Smart Contract

Abstract

When faced with massive data volumes, many current companies and institutions usually choose centralized databases or distributed databases to meet their data storage needs. But untrusted centralized third-party auditor can pose serious security problems. Malicious database service providers may tamper with or delete users data to achieve certain benefits, while returning false data integrity verification results to users. The traditional solution is to introduce a third-party auditor to ensure the reliability of the data verification results, but this third-party auditor may also be untrustworthy and partner with the database service provider to forge false data verification results. The centralization of the database system makes the verification of data integrity a difficult but necessary task. Therefore, we propose a data integrity verification scheme using smart contract (DIV-SC) to ensure the reliability of data integrity verification results in a centralized database environment. We introduce the blockchain as a decentralized third-party auditor. The immutability of the blockchain can ensure that the information stored on the blockchain will not be maliciously tampered with. Meanwhile, the smart contract deployed on the blockchain can ensure that the procedure of storing verification information and the verification procedure are correct and will not be affected by any malicious parties.