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Use Cases

In the context of e-commerce and the ENSURESEC project, you can use the Audit Trail Gateway to share immutable and auditable data and events and guarantee the Immutability of Large Data Sets.

Sharing Immutable and Auditable Data and Events​

This scenario involves a small amount of data that a channel Author and writer subscribers want to share with reader subscribers. All the information is stored in the Audit Trail, and channel reader subscribers can verify its source (identity of the writer subscribers).

One example of this scenario is sharing threat information detected by a sensor on a critical e-commerce infrastructure to alert all other systems connected to the same infrastructure.

You could implement the following workflow:

  1. Company X has registered and verified its Identity as well as an identity for employee Y and device (sensor) Z.
  2. Company A has been registered and verified its identity as well as the identity of an employee B and tool C.
  3. The device Z uses the Gateway(GW) APIs to create channel A.
  4. The tool C uses the GW APIs to search for channels based on available indexing metadata and request a subscription to the selected channel A.
  5. The device Z uses the GW APIs to authorize tool C to access the channel A as a reader.
  6. The device Z uses the GW APIs to add data to channel A.
  7. Tool C is automatically notified of new data coming from device Z.

Assuring the Immutability of Large Data Sets​

This scenario includes storing and sharing information across an organizations' data sets maintained in large data lakes while guaranteeing that the data sets have not been altered over time or passed to unauthorized parties.

In this case, a channel’s Author and writer subscribers first index the data sets, hash them and store the hash in the Audit Trail (using the GW APIs) on a channel registered with the created index and data set metadata. Authorized reader subscribers will receive the given data set and its index/metadata and use them to retrieve and subscribe to the requested channel. Then they can compare the hash stored in the Audit Trail with the one generated from the received data set.

This process includes storing hashes of data logs collected by e-commerce systems on the Audit Trail, allowing authorized parties to perform a forensic investigation in case of cyber-physical attacks on e-commerce infrastructure, and detect any tampering with such logs.

You can implement a similar workflow as the Sharing Immutable and Auditable Data and Events scenario. The client should implement the exchange of data sets, extract their hash, and compare the hashes using the Audit Trail GW APIs.