  Data tampering is often considered a severe problem in industrial
applications as it can lead to inaccurate financial reports or even a corporate
security crisis. A correct representation of data is essential for companies'
core business processes and is demanded by investors and customers. Traditional
data audits are performed through third-party auditing services; however, these
services are expensive and can be untrustworthy in some cases. Blockchain and
smart contracts provide a decentralized mechanism to achieve secure and
trustworthy data integrity verification; however, existing solutions present
challenges in terms of scalability, privacy protection, and compliance with
data regulations. In this paper, we propose the AUtomated and Decentralized
InTegrity vErification Model (AUDITEM) to assist business stakeholders in
verifying data integrity in a trustworthy and automated manner. To address the
challenges in existing integrity verification processes, our model uses
carefully designed smart contracts and a distributed file system to store
integrity verification attributes and uses blockchain to enhance the
authenticity of data certificates. A sub-module called Data Integrity
Verification Tool (DIVT) is also developed to support easy-to-use interfaces
and customizable verification operations. This paper presents a detailed
implementation and designs experiments to verify the proposed model. The
experimental and analytical results demonstrate that our model is feasible and
efficient to meet various business requirements for data integrity
verification.
