  Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of
transactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive the environment
for building distributed reliable applications. Although, blockchain technology
has been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the
previous work focused on using blockchain to develop a secure and immutable
scientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the
provenance records. In this work, we leverage blockchain as a platform to
facilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and
management. The developed system utilizes smart contracts and open provenance
model (OPM) to record immutable data trails. We show that our proposed
framework can efficiently and securely capture and validate provenance data,
and prevent any malicious modification to the captured data as long as the
majority of the participants are honest.
