Tamper-Evident Data Architectures for Cross-Sector Digital Trust: A Comparative Framework for Traceability, Interoperability, and System Resilience
Main article
Abstract
Digital trust is increasingly produced not by institutions alone but by the data architectures that record, link, and expose evidence of what happened. This article develops a comparative framework for tamper-evident data architectures—systems that make unauthorized modification of recorded data detectable—and evaluates their fitness for cross-sector digital trust. Rather than treating distributed-ledger technology as a single artefact, we distinguish six recurring architectural patterns, ranging from public permissionless ledgers to centralized hash-chained logs, and assess them along seven methodological dimensions: traceability granularity, interoperability, system resilience, throughput, privacy, governance clarity, and cost-efficiency. Using a structured comparative coding design, we score each pattern and analyse the resulting matrix descriptively and through scenario-weighted suitability ranking for three representative settings: supply-chain traceability, healthcare data exchange, and energy peer-to-peer trading. The analysis shows that no single architecture dominates; fitness is contingent on which trust property a sector prioritizes. Permissioned and hybrid ledgers offer the most balanced profiles for regulated data exchange, public ledgers maximize resilience and auditability at the cost of throughput and privacy, and centralized tamper-evident logs remain competitive where governance and efficiency outweigh decentralization. We argue that traceability, interoperability, and resilience should be treated as explicit, weighted design objectives rather than assumed by-products of a chosen platform, and we offer a selection framework that aligns architectural choice with sector-specific trust requirements. The contribution is conceptual and methodological: a transparent, reproducible basis for choosing tamper-evident architectures before system construction begins.
