BLOCKCHAIN-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR SECURE AND TRANSPARENT DIGITAL DATA MANAGEMENT

Digital data is created, exchanged, and stored across organizations and online services. Conventional centralized systems can face challengesinvolving unauthorized modification, limited auditability, fragmented access control, and trust between independent parties. This paper proposes ablockchain-based framework for secure and transparent digital data management. The framework uses a permissioned distributed ledger to recorddata-related events, cryptographic hashes to support integrity verification, smart contracts to enforce agreed rules, and off-chain storage for large orsensitive files. Rather than storing confidential documents directly on a public ledger, the design keeps the underlying data in controlled storage andrecords only appropriate references, hashes, permissions, and audit events on-chain. The proposed architecture includes identity and accessmanagement, data submission, integrity checking, ledger recording, retrieval, and audit modules. Security, privacy, scalability, and governance areconsidered throughout the design. This paper provides a proposed architecture and evaluation plan; actual performance and security claims must beestablished through implementation and testing.