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04 Provenance and Audit Trails

The anchor case

Every failure in this module, in one system, with people imprisoned on the output.

Lesson 06 of 06 · 8 min

Post Office Horizon, Bates & Ors v Post Office Ltd (No 6: Horizon Issues) [2019] EWHC 3408 (QB). Read the Audit Store and transaction-correction-tool passages before you design any of this. It is not a technical text and it is the most persuasive document in this module.

The claimed integrity controls are exactly what a modern design review would applaud. Each transaction basket received a sequential number and a digital signature, such that "if the data in the basket were to change after the digital signature was generated, this would be apparent." Baskets were copied to an Audit Store where a further seal was applied. On paper: hash-chained, sealed, tamper-evident.

Predict

Given sequential numbering, per-basket digital signatures and a sealed audit store — what defeated it?

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