Sorry, I didn’t mean to be dismissive. I wholeheartedly agree with you. What I meant was that it’s a shame I, as an engineer in the year 2023, would have a hard time pitching a blockchain solution to a non-crypto problem to paying customers no matter how fitting the solution might be. I don’t think that’s very disputable. Now this attitude is entirely driven by the last decade of unsubstantiated crypto hype and associated bad faith actors. It has nothing to do with the technology as it is.

Sorry, it was not my intention to be vague. I admit to not having a complete implementation in mind. My point is that linking each log as a block in a chain with hashes forces an order that is more difficult to tamper with than a timestamp or auto incremented integer id. You have to alter more data to inject or purge records from a chain than you would with a table of timestamped records. I admit I can’t make my case better than that.

As for the simplicity factor. I think your suggestion of serving logs to peers from a server like an RSS feed is a fine solution.

But I can setup a MultiChain instance In a few hours and start issuing tokens. I can send the same link out to my peers and auditors for them to connect and propagate the shared state. The community can shrink and grow without the members having to change anything. Now it’s mostly a hands off venture that scales relatively well. I’m an okay programmer but to coordinate an effort to build, test and verify a system to do the same with RSS feeds across multiple companies would take me months. Something like MultiChain or HyperLedger is comparatively turnkey.

I’m not here to say this is the best way to do it. I’m just saying there’s some merit to leveraging these technologies.

If you ask me, audit logs should just be posted to Twitter, the only true write-only database.

I mean you would need the hashing and consensus stuff to figure out exactly how the chain diverged. Just pooling the event would in theory be enough to prove that shenanigans were afoot then the ledgers don’t align, but that’s a bit too brittle to base a bi-annual evaluation on. You could close those up and setup some eventual-consistency across peers, sure but now you’re talking about a some complicated proprietary software. It’s also not clear how a system like that would scale.

There’s plenty of convenient self-hosted blockchain solutions out there already that can be used to accomplish this. And there are a ton of tools to do analysis and tracing on these chains. This makes it not unreasonable when compared to a dedicated solution.

I’m sure the hardcore variant would have its uses. But the goal isn’t necessarily to make fraud impossible, just evident. So probably more towards the latter option. And you are correct that you don’t need a blockchain to create a distributed database that enforces consensus. It’s just a neat tool you could use that scales pretty well, is relatively low maintenance(SWE hours not GPU hours), can adapt to a lot of cases, and is affordable for small and mid-sized companies. You could do the same by broadcasting your events to all your peers and having each peer save everyone’s events to compare notes later. But this would be a hassle to setup and keep consistent.

Most auditing and insurance companies don’t have a webhook where you can arbitrarily send your logs to. They have humans with eyes and fingers holding risk management and law degrees called auditors. That you need to, with words and arguments,convince of your process integrity. And What happens if you switch insurer or certifier? You probably have to do a ton of IT work to change the format and destination of your logs. And how do you prove that your process was not manipulated during the transition?

What you describe are digital notary services and it’s billion-dollar industry. All they do is be a trusted third party that records process integrity. IAM, change logs, RFCs, financial transactions, incident detection, and response are all sent in real time so you are ready for certification or M&A. Most small and mid-sized enterprises can’t afford that kind of service and are often locked out of certain certifications or insurances or take a huge price cut when acquired.

Something like pooling together resources to a provable immutable log trail isn’t unreasonable.

Let’s say a country mandates their Telecom sector to audit it’s transactions. The idea would be to share the network with several peers, your telecoms. In this case “mining” would be verifying the integrity if the chain and can be done by anyone of the peers. The government or auditing authority could also be a peer in the network and they are all capable of verifying the integrity of the chain through “mining”. You are right that it’s easier to have a small group of peers conspire to manipulate the chain. But it’s a lot harder for several telecoms to conspire than for one rogue CFO to cook the books.

In this application you’re not generating ‘valuable’ tokens in the sense bitcoin does it, but the value is the integrity of the chain. People value the proof that no one has redacted or injected any transactions.

The security comes from consensus. Everyone needs to agree about what the truth is. The burden of proof is proportional to the number of peers that need to agree. Public chains require a lot of work to create consensus amongst hundreds of thousands of peers. Let’s say your chain consists of 12 companies all using the same chain to validate and verify each other’s transactions so they are ready for an audit.

Yes, it’s easier to have 12 peers conspire to manipulate the chain than to have 200 000 peers. But making 12 businesses conspire to cook the books is already several orders of magnitude more difficult than the checks and balances we have in place now.

This right here is really the spirit of the post. Yes there’s many impractical applications. Much like there are many impractical applications for RDBMSs, but the tech has such a stank on it, it’s important to remember it’s just a tool that can be useful despite the hype cycle.

Not every log needs that kind of security and a chain does not need to be public. You download blocks from peers and do your own accounting.

Nothing is preventing you from only giving access to your chain to a trusted circle of peers.

Something you could do is encrypt your logs and push them to a chain shared by a number of peers who do they same with their own keys. Now you have a pool of accountability buddies, because if someone tries to tamper with the logs, you all hang together.

If you’re doing some spooky stuff and need to prove a high degree of integrity is you could push encrypted logs to a chain. The auditor then can appoint several independent parties whose only job it is to continuously prove the integrity of your logs. After that is proven you can release your keys to the auditor who can inspect your logs knowing that they have been complete and untampered during the audit period.

Again I understand it’s not the most efficient system, but there are less efficient and less flexible systems out there in enterprise land haha

Yeah you’re not wrong, that would be more efficient. Again a blockchain is not an efficient way to do it. But it would be effective.

In practice audit logs are used by and for auditors. Non-technicals that need evidence that would hold up to argument. Yes you could send your logs to a third party. Now you have to prove that third parties trustworthiness twice a year to the standards of each legal entity you operate in. And lawyers are more expensive than blockchain devs haha :p

Having a private blockchain that you can share with several changing parties that can subscribe to it. Without having to update anything about your infrastructure is a benefit.

Even though I’ve lived through several iso 27001 certifications, I’m still walking on thin ice when I say that it would probably easier to explain the blockchain in practice than any other proof of completeness method. Because the public is more aware of it. On the other hand the public is also more skeptical of crypto so it could also backfire :p

Yeah the problem isn’t the veracity of the logs, it’s providing a mechanism for third parties of proving that the sequence of events in your log hasn’t been tampered with after the fact

Yeah it’s not ideal, but you only need to pay the gas cost when you need to prove integrity and that’s alot cheaper than having to constantly be in sync with the world.

Audit logs and Access control paper trails.

Security event logging has to be:

1. Broadly accessible
2. Write-protected
3. offering some proof of completeness.

These three requirements are tricky and often conflicting. Block-chain might be an inefficient way to achieve these, but the glove does fit quite neatly.

Logistical paperwork

• Purchase Orders/Invoices and packing slips
• Waybills/Bills of lading and CMR’s

These kinds of documents require multiple stages of matching and approval by untrusted 3rd parties. There are dozens of ecosystems of interacting systems that support processing these documents, but most people still use paper. Paper is more reliable when you need to deliver a container full of diapers from Poland to North Sudan. It’s more reliable but incredibly prone to fraud and forgery. Having all of these approvals and transactions tracked on a blockchain and letting different systems interact with the same chain, would make it possible without each ERP having a rest API to each other ERP.

Man, I have to agree. Your write up reflect my experience with Azure Functions in a mid-large sized application way more than the post. Fantastic

This is a bit of a narrow view of a very vague term. Having worked with many different sizes of organisations i can say that the responsibilities of whomever is labelled CTO are completely arbitrary. The only thing you can establish is that they are the person accountable for the technology decisions.

Sometimes that’s a legacy developer, sometimes that’s the first sys-admin.

Sometimes it’s the VP of engineering.

Sometimes that’s the person that maintains the best relationships with software vendors.

Sometimes it’s the person that was hired externally to explain the tech to the CEO and let’s them make informed executive decisions.

Sometimes it’s just a public figure used to promote the org and maybe do DevRel.

Sometimes it’s the Architect that designed the ecosystem.

Sometimes it’s the ancient programmer that has kidnapped the entire codebase so that no-one else can sanely work on it.

Sometimes it’s a six sigma type that setup the ticketing system, PRs and the release process.

At any size, the CTO is whatever the org needs him to be at that point.

The way I managed to get an intuition about the language is just building classic boardgames. Checkers, chess, diplomacy and go are great exercise to start working with lists and dimensions, declaring multiple predicates and have them interact with each other. Changing the state of the program and using the traces to branch out decisions. Remember to keep track of your interpreter. Different interpreters act in surprising ways. The order of operations of SWI is different than Tau.

After that, the honest truth is that Prolog isn’t widely used enough to have a ‘modern standard approach’. The best way is to treat it like any other embedded subsystem: light and concise scripts embedded in a grown-up language.

Theres like a whole class of “Stuff you have to relearn every time you have to use it”: XPath, JMESPath, cron, ffmpeg, ImageMagick, PostScript etc… REGEX might be king of those :p

Also works for cron jobs, shell scripts, SQL queries, HTML layouts and the odd mermaid diagram

A single race condition is a tragedy. A million race conditions is eventual consistency.

What I love most about Krazam is that in every video they make, you see the guy move up the usual tech career ladder xD