Reinforcing Immutability of Permissioned Blockchains with Keyless Signatures' Infrastructure

Abstract

With the emergence of Bitcoin, businesses are focusing on leveraging Bitcoin's blockchain technology to non-cryptocurrency based applications to improve efficiency of the operations. These business applications operate in environments where participants have verified identities; these are called permissioned environments. Blockchain is an immutable and append only distributed ledger that can be utilized for record keeping applications. We observe that when blockchain technology is adapted from permissionless environments to permissioned environments the immutability of blockchain becomes questionable as the end-users may not monitor or store a copy of the blockchain. We propose the use of Keyless Signatures' Infrastructure as an additional mechanism to ensure irreversible and irrefutable proof of block confirmations which acts as a global proof thus preserving long term immutability of blockchain in permissioned environments.