Registers: Systems of Record with Guaranteed Integrity
summary
Prototype registers provide a single source of truth with cryptographic integrity for structured UK government data they model everything as an append-only datastore and mint records that carry Merkle tree proofs so a single food inspection or a premises entry like EF017 can be verified without downloading the whole log The team builds indexes by scanning the append log and serves a read API currently backed by Postgres implementation and explores using Certificate Transparency exploration for stronger auditability while acknowledging unresolved API and indexing details
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:46What GDS has done
- 2:32User needs
- 5:36Government as a platform
- 8:27Relationship with data
- 9:36Registers
- 11:18Good Registers
- 12:39Example Entry
- 14:05Registers are authoritative
- 16:50Register of Premises
- 18:45Data Quality
- 21:09Guaranteed Integrity
- 23:26Proof of Authenticity
- 25:41Consistency Proof
- 27:34Tracking Changes
- 29:09Primary Key
- 30:18Proposed API
- 31:19Mint API
- 32:29Thirdparty index
- 34:16Conclusion
- 35:14Implementation details
- 36:41Proofs
- 38:59Summary
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