Detecting Insider Attacks on Databases using Blockchains

Shubham Sharma, Rahul Gupta, Shubham Sahai Srivastava, Sandeep K. Shukla

Abstract

Applications relying on centralized databases are often vulnerable to insider attacks. Any user with administrative privileges to the database system or the hosting server, is capable of modifying the database entries. Furthermore, such a user might modify the corresponding log entries, making it extremely difficult to detect such an attack. Attribution of the attack to privileged users would also be challenging. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem using the tamperresistance property of blockchains. We have implemented and tested our protocol, using multichain, on a web-based online academic grading database application with a goal to make it robust to such an insider attack.