BCALS: Blockchain‐based secure log management system for cloud computing

Abstract

A computing environment requires a robust and comprehensive process to track and document user activities to uphold confidence in the system. Audit logs are used for this purpose to monitor the actions of administrators and users. However, these logs are vulnerable to multidimensional attacks, including modification of logs, erasability of logs, and privacy of the user. Since administrators have unprecedented access to these logs, they can modify, delete, and even destroy them. Securing these logs against malicious activities is the prime requirement of audit log management. Existing schemes have several limitations, including immutability, computational expensiveness, missing semantics, and are not verifiable. Various schemes have been proposed for this purpose, but a standard method is required to structure heterogeneous logs and their security semantically. To cope with these limitations, in this paper, we propose a Log Management System using blockchain. The proposed system will ensure audit logs' security, which will eventually strengthen users' trust in the computing environment and make it unbreachable even by the administrators. It has been evinced that our model performed better in terms of performance and features already mentioned when compared with existing schemes.

Incentive approaches for cloud computing: challenges and solutions

“…Additionally, the log should be regularly backed up and stored in a secure offsite location to ensure that any modifications or deletions can be detected and remedied. Ali, Khan [31] proposed a log management system using blockchain to cope with several limitations. It outperformed previous models regarding functionality and performance.…”

Blockchain-Based Logging to Defeat Malicious Insiders: The Case of Remote Health Monitoring Systems

“…In a similar vein, to reconcile high computational power and rapid data storage many researchers proposed state-of-the-art solutions, Ahmed et al [34] proposed a blockchain-based logs management to ensure log audit security named BCALS. The main purpose of this framework is to develop a secure and immutable audit log security that the admin cannot modify it.…”

Listening to what the system tells us: Innovative auditing for distributed systems

“…We have already mentioned in the Introduction the tools currently used for the security of cloud-based systems (Kufel, 2016) and highlighted their limitations concerning the auditing requirements of blockchains and distributed ledgers. Several contributions (Cucurull and Puiggali, 2016;Ahmad et al, 2018;Li et al, 2020;Ali et al, 2022) should be mentioned that are orthogonal to ours, in that rather than the analytics on logs generated in distributed environments such as blockchains and distributed ledgers, they are aimed at using blockchains for secure log management. The approach described in Regueiro et al (2021) is in line with those above.…”