Scrybe: A Second-Generation Blockchain Technology with Lightweight Mining for Secure Provenance and Related Applications

The recent popularity of cryptocurrencies has highlighted the versatility and applications of a decentralized, public blockchain. Blockchain provides a data structure that can guarantee both the integrity and non-repudiation of data, as well as providing provenance pertaining to such data. Our novel Lightweight Mining (LWM) algorithm provides these guarantees with minimal resource requirements. Our approach to blockchain-based data provenance, paired with the LWM algorithm, provides the legal and ethical framework for key classes of provenance to be managed. Contributions of this paper include the following: first, we describe the Scrybe system, including the Lightweight mining algorithm. We then note principles of secure provenance and explain how to adapt Scrybe to a series of practical use cases, such as academic integrity, forensic management of evidence, and secure logging. Finally, we explain the key features of the Scrybe system that enable secure provenance for these use cases, and we describe resilience of the system to denial of service attacks and repudiation.