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@article{208359,
        author = {Rashi Vakhare and Sakshi Chavan},
        title = {MerkleAudit: A Merkle Tree-Based Blockchain Framework for Tamper-Evident Audit Logging in Digital Record Systems},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {no},
        pages = {11-20},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=208359},
        abstract = {In digital record-keeping systems, ensuring the integrity and authenticity of audit logs is critical for regulatory compliance, security assurance, and post-incident forensic analysis. Conventional centralized logging architectures remain vulnerable to tampering by insiders with administrative access and constitute single points of failure: an adversary who compromises the log store, or an operator who abuses legitimate access, can retroactively rewrite the historical record without leaving evidence of the change. Blockchain technology offers a compelling countermeasure, since data committed to a well-secured blockchain is computationally infeasible to alter retroactively. However, anchoring every individual log entry on-chain introduces prohibitive latency, storage overhead, and transaction cost, limiting its practicality for high-throughput logging environments such as enterprise transaction systems, hospital record systems, or academic record-keeping platforms.
This paper presents MerkleAudit, a hybrid logging framework that combines Merkle tree-based authenticated data structures with blockchain anchoring to address these limitations. MerkleAudit batches log entries off-chain into Merkle trees and commits only the resulting root hash to the blockchain, decoupling log-ingestion throughput from on-chain transaction frequency and substantially improving scalability while preserving tamper-evidence. The framework further supports efficient, privacy-preserving inclusion proofs that allow verification of a single log entry without disclosing the full log set or requiring direct database access, and restricts log submission to an authorized, role-based allow-list, combining the auditability of public verification with the access control of a permissioned system. We implemented and evaluated a prototype of MerkleAudit on the Ethereum Sepolia test network, demonstrating that it can process high volumes of log entries with minimal on-chain storage footprint, rapid proof verification, and reliable detection of tampering, deletion, and forgery attempts. A gas-cost benchmark across batch sizes from 10 to 5,000 entries shows savings of up to 99.97% relative to a naive per-entry logging baseline, while a 25-test adversarial suite and an independent static-analysis pass confirm that no exploitable vulnerabilities were introduced by the batching design. MerkleAudit thus offers a practical, cost-efficient, and privacy-preserving approach to verifiable audit logging for security-critical digital record systems.},
        keywords = {blockchain, Merkle trees, consortium ledger, audit logging, tamper-evident storage, O (log N) inclusion proofs, data integrity, privacy-preserving verification, smart contract security},
        month = {September},
        }