Integrating bloxberg's Proof of Existence Service With MATLAB

Abstract

Proof of Existence as a blockchain service has first been published in 2013 as a public notary service on the Bitcoin network and can be used to verify the existence of a particular file in a specific point of time without sharing the file or its content itself. This service is also available on the Ethereum based bloxberg network, a decentralized research infrastructure that is governed, operated and developed by an international consortium of research facilities. Since it is desirable to integrate the creation of this proof tightly into the research workflow, namely the acquisition and processing of research data, we show a simple to integrate MATLAB extension based solution with the concept being applicable to other programming languages and environments as well.

A Blockchain-Based Approach to Provenance and Reproducibility in Research Workflows

“…An increasingly popular approach to deal with verification of data set authenticity and provenance comes by leveraging blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) [18]- [20]. While most public blokchain networks operate according to a Proof of Work consensus mechanisms, other distributed trust architectures can be established using a Proof of Authority consensus mechanism based on a consortium of international research organizations in order to provide a Proof of Existence blockchain service which can be used to verify the existence of any research data and to validate its integrity, while still preserving data privacy mechanisms [21]- [24].…”

“…Verification of research data (or any kind of data) for authenticity is often based on the application of cryptographic hash functions for fingerprinting, and the appropriate trust-worthy distributed infrastructures providing digital signatures in order to validate the data ownership, e.g. the web-based but Ethereum backed bloxberg Certify DApp, as well as data models for emerging identifier standards [21], [23], [25], thus, supporting the certification of any type of data that might occur as part of a scientific research workflow. Certification of a generic research object, such as data or documents, during the scientific research workflow can improve the transparency, reproducibility, data integrity, and foster open science [26]- [29].…”