Guaranteeing the integrity and reliability of distributed personal information access records

Abstract

Attackers try to forge or delete personal information access records to hide traces of their attacks. As personal information access records can be used to analyze infringement accidents or as legal evidence in the event of malicious attacks, maintaining their integrity is very important. This article presents measures to efficiently prove the integrity of distributed personal information access records. To construct a reliable log system, diversified security requirements are established, and mechanisms such as a hash chain, message authentication code, and Merkle tree are incorporated. Moreover, as integrity is proved through a third-party verification institution, attacks by external as well as internal attackers can be detected. During the validation process, existing log record protection methods fail to detect forgery or deletion of certain data or have difficulty identifying the time of attack, but such drawbacks are addressed by the proposed integrity verification process, with only a minor increase in computational load.