Blockchain as a technology has been successfully deployed in the financial industry. As the technology continues to mature, there are opportunities to use this to solve operational challenges in Aerospace. One of the common use cases is replacing paper records as a proof of compliance with a blockchain enabled distributed ledger.
Commonly available open source blockchain frameworks have security ingrained in the components. However, replacing paper records with a blockchain based distributed ledger will require investigation of potential risks involved in the end to end usage of this technology for records management.
The objective of this paper is to elucidate potential risks in an aviation record management workflow environment enabled by blockchain and suggest requirements to mitigate the risks.
In addition requirements for Blockchain based systems will be proposed, which will guarantee minimum functional requirements like
Protection of confidential information
Integrity of the information in a record
Safeguards against unauthorized access
The potential gaps are understood using an illustrative end to end blockchain based process along with their conceptual high level intermediate steps. For example:
Authenticated trusted digital identities of the participants whose transactions are recorded in distributed ledgers
Trusted source which distributes these identities and has a mechanism to update, revoke and safely secure these identities
Trusted methods to ensure detection if the digital identities are compromised
Trusted method to demonstrate controlled authorization process for digital identities as per access control rules
Trusted methods to demonstrate the generation of accounting logs