Reliable Data Provenance in HCN

Network provenance refers to collecting and storing network runtime data and events to construct a provenance graph, which can be used for root-cause analysis of network errors. As the future networks are embracing a distributed and heterogeneous architecture, reliable data provenance across network trust domains become a challenging issue. In this chapter, we investigate the blockchain-based data provenance approach in HCN. First, we review the motivations, applications, and requirements of designing reliable provenance architecture. Then, we discuss related works to highlight the design challenges in balancing decentralization and efficiency in network data provenance. To address the challenges, we present a representative blockchain-based distributed provenance scheme. More specifically, a multi-level query index based on a provenance graph is designed with succinct on-chain digests. By tailoring the designs of SNARK-based on/off-chain computation models, efficient cross-domain provenance query is achieved with correctness and integrity guarantees. Security analysis and experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.