BLOCKCHAIN-ENABLED AUDIT TRAIL SYSTEM (BEATS) FOR TAMPER-PROOF DATA LOGGING

Abstract

Traditional audit trail systems are essential for tracking system activities and ensuring data integrity, yet they often suffer from inefficiencies, high operational costs, and vulnerabilities to tampering and unauthorized access. While blockchain technology offers a decentralized and immutable solution to enhance the security, transparency, and reliability of audit trails, it struggles with scalability— particularly when verifying specific transactions within large datasets. To address this gap, we propose BEATS (Blockchainbased Efficient Audit Trail System), an optimized audit solution that incorporates a Cryptographic Accumulator to securely and efficiently verify transaction authenticity without full ledger scans or external databases. Implemented on the Hyperledger Sawtooth platform and evaluated against conventional search methods, BEATS achieves constant-time (O(1)) performance in both time and space complexity using an RSA-based accumulator. The results demonstrate significant improvements in verification speed and scalability, making BEATS a practical and robust framework for secure audit trail management in highvolume blockchain environments.