Transparent Notary Service: A Transparency Framework for Secure and Verifiable Network Evidence

Ensuring data integrity and traceability poses a significant challenge in contemporary network environments, particularly in the context of cloud-native architectures, SoftwareDefined Networks (SDN), Internet of Things (IoT), and imminent 6G technologies. Conventional data collection and verification methodologies have deficiencies in terms of transparency and auditability, limiting decision-making processes and their automation. To address these issues, we propose the application of a Transparent Notary Service (TNS), a digital notarization framework that enables the secure registration and assessment of evidence statements on network elements, using append-only logs and cryptographic signatures. The proposed system leverages efficient digital signatures and verifiable and immutable records to provide a trusted evidence registry, enabling entities to register signed statements while ensuring their integrity without the need for content validation. This approach enhances Zero Trust Architectures (ZTA) by providing cryptographically verifiable data that can support access control decisions, network orchestration, and forensic auditing. This paper presents a conceptual framework and an initial design approach for the TNS, outlining its key components and potential implementation paths rather than a fully deployed system. The proposed framework ensures secure, efficient, and transparent evidence registration, offering a lightweight alternative to traditional blockchain-based solutions. Future work will explore extended format support, enhanced storage optimization, and automated integrity verification mechanisms.