nibblebit

Sorry, I didn't mean to be dismissive. I wholeheartedly agree with you. What I meant was that it's a shame I, as an engineer in the year 2023, would have a hard time pitching a blockchain solution to a non-crypto problem to paying customers no matter how fitting the solution might be. I don't think that's very disputable. Now this attitude is entirely driven by the last decade of unsubstantiated crypto hype and associated bad faith actors. It has nothing to do with the technology as it is.

Sorry, it was not my intention to be vague. I admit to not having a complete implementation in mind. My point is that linking each log as a block in a chain with hashes forces an order that is more difficult to tamper with than a timestamp or auto incremented integer id. You have to alter more data to inject or purge records from a chain than you would with a table of timestamped records. I admit I can't make my case better than that.

As for the simplicity factor. I think your suggestion of serving logs to peers from a server like an RSS feed is a fine solution.

But I can setup a MultiChain instance In a few hours and start issuing tokens. I can send the same link out to my peers and auditors for them to connect and propagate the shared state. The community can shrink and grow without the members having to change anything. Now it's mostly a hands off venture that scales relatively well. I'm an okay programmer but to coordinate an effort to build, test and verify a system to do the same with RSS feeds across multiple companies would take me months. Something like MultiChain or HyperLedger is comparatively turnkey.

I'm not here to say this is the best way to do it. I'm just saying there's some merit to leveraging these technologies.

If you ask me, audit logs should just be posted to Twitter, the only true write-only database.

I mean you would need the hashing and consensus stuff to figure out exactly how the chain diverged. Just pooling the event would in theory be enough to prove that shenanigans were afoot then the ledgers don't align, but that's a bit too brittle to base a bi-annual evaluation on. You could close those up and setup some eventual-consistency across peers, sure but now you're talking about a some complicated proprietary software. It's also not clear how a system like that would scale.

There's plenty of convenient self-hosted blockchain solutions out there already that can be used to accomplish this. And there are a ton of tools to do analysis and tracing on these chains. This makes it not unreasonable when compared to a dedicated solution.

I'm sure the hardcore variant would have its uses. But the goal isn't necessarily to make fraud impossible, just evident. So probably more towards the latter option. And you are correct that you don't need a blockchain to create a distributed database that enforces consensus. It's just a neat tool you could use that scales pretty well, is relatively low maintenance(SWE hours not GPU hours), can adapt to a lot of cases, and is affordable for small and mid-sized companies. You could do the same by broadcasting your events to all your peers and having each peer save everyone's events to compare notes later. But this would be a hassle to setup and keep consistent.

Most auditing and insurance companies don't have a webhook where you can arbitrarily send your logs to. They have humans with eyes and fingers holding risk management and law degrees called auditors. That you need to, with words and arguments,convince of your process integrity. And What happens if you switch insurer or certifier? You probably have to do a ton of IT work to change the format and destination of your logs. And how do you prove that your process was not manipulated during the transition?

What you describe are digital notary services and it's billion-dollar industry. All they do is be a trusted third party that records process integrity. IAM, change logs, RFCs, financial transactions, incident detection, and response are all sent in real time so you are ready for certification or M&A. Most small and mid-sized enterprises can't afford that kind of service and are often locked out of certain certifications or insurances or take a huge price cut when acquired.

Something like pooling together resources to a provable immutable log trail isn't unreasonable.

Let's say a country mandates their Telecom sector to audit it's transactions. The idea would be to share the network with several peers, your telecoms. In this case "mining" would be verifying the integrity if the chain and can be done by anyone of the peers. The government or auditing authority could also be a peer in the network and they are all capable of verifying the integrity of the chain through "mining". You are right that it's easier to have a small group of peers conspire to manipulate the chain. But it's a lot harder for several telecoms to conspire than for one rogue CFO to cook the books.

In this application you're not generating 'valuable' tokens in the sense bitcoin does it, but the value is the integrity of the chain. People value the proof that no one has redacted or injected any transactions.

The security comes from consensus. Everyone needs to agree about what the truth is. The burden of proof is proportional to the number of peers that need to agree. Public chains require a lot of work to create consensus amongst hundreds of thousands of peers. Let's say your chain consists of 12 companies all using the same chain to validate and verify each other's transactions so they are ready for an audit.

Yes, it's easier to have 12 peers conspire to manipulate the chain than to have 200 000 peers. But making 12 businesses conspire to cook the books is already several orders of magnitude more difficult than the checks and balances we have in place now.

This right here is really the spirit of the post. Yes there's many impractical applications. Much like there are many impractical applications for RDBMSs, but the tech has such a stank on it, it's important to remember it's just a tool that can be useful despite the hype cycle.

Not every log needs that kind of security and a chain does not need to be public. You download blocks from peers and do your own accounting.

Nothing is preventing you from only giving access to your chain to a trusted circle of peers.

Something you could do is encrypt your logs and push them to a chain shared by a number of peers who do they same with their own keys. Now you have a pool of accountability buddies, because if someone tries to tamper with the logs, you all hang together.

If you're doing some spooky stuff and need to prove a high degree of integrity is you could push encrypted logs to a chain. The auditor then can appoint several independent parties whose only job it is to continuously prove the integrity of your logs. After that is proven you can release your keys to the auditor who can inspect your logs knowing that they have been complete and untampered during the audit period.

Again I understand it's not the most efficient system, but there are less efficient and less flexible systems out there in enterprise land haha

Yeah you're not wrong, that would be more efficient. Again a blockchain is not an efficient way to do it. But it would be effective.

In practice audit logs are used by and for auditors. Non-technicals that need evidence that would hold up to argument. Yes you could send your logs to a third party. Now you have to prove that third parties trustworthiness twice a year to the standards of each legal entity you operate in. And lawyers are more expensive than blockchain devs haha :p

Having a private blockchain that you can share with several changing parties that can subscribe to it. Without having to update anything about your infrastructure is a benefit.

Even though I've lived through several iso 27001 certifications, I'm still walking on thin ice when I say that it would probably easier to explain the blockchain in practice than any other proof of completeness method. Because the public is more aware of it. On the other hand the public is also more skeptical of crypto so it could also backfire :p

Yeah the problem isn't the veracity of the logs, it's providing a mechanism for third parties of proving that the sequence of events in your log hasn't been tampered with after the fact

Yeah it's not ideal, but you only need to pay the gas cost when you need to prove integrity and that's alot cheaper than having to constantly be in sync with the world.