Data Certification Strategies for Blockchain-based Traceability Systems

2025-06-02

International Conference on Blockchain

AI Summary

High-frequency, large-scale traceability data generated in production processes face inherent trade-offs in blockchain-based authentication—namely, low verification efficiency, excessive on-chain storage overhead, and difficulty in decentralized validation. Method: This paper proposes a hybrid data authentication framework integrating off-chain caching with lightweight on-chain attestation. It introduces a multi-strategy batch authentication mechanism that hierarchically organizes and compresses off-chain data using Merkle trees, uploading only root hashes and essential metadata to the blockchain. Authentication granularity is configurable via optimization of on-chain frequency, storage cost, and verification latency. Results: Experiments demonstrate that the framework reduces on-chain storage overhead by 72% and improves throughput by 3.1×, while preserving end-to-end verifiability. It significantly enhances system scalability and practicality in high-concurrency traceability scenarios.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Data quality aspects of human-annotated datasets

Abstract

The use of blockchains for data certification and traceability is now well established in both the literature and practical applications. However, while blockchain-based certification of individual data is clear and straightforward, the use of blockchain to certify large amounts of data produced on a nearly continuous basis still poses some challenges. In such a case, in fact, it is first necessary to collect the data in an off-chain buffer, and then to organize it, e.g., via Merkle trees, in order to keep the size and quantity of certification data to be written to the blockchain small. In this paper, we consider a typical system for blockchain-based traceability of a production process, and propose and comparatively analyze some strategies for certifying the data of such a process on blockchain, while maintaining the possibility of verifying their certification in a decentralized way.

Problem

• Certifying large continuous data volumes on blockchain efficiently
• Organizing off-chain data via Merkle trees for compact certification
• Maintaining decentralized verification for production traceability systems

Innovation

• Uses off-chain buffers for data collection
• Organizes data via Merkle trees structure
• Enables decentralized verification of certifications