A method and system is provided for a tamper-proof storage of one or more records
of an audit trail in a database. Since the integrity of the database records may
be vulnerable to actions taken by a user such as a privileged database administrator,
a mechanism is provided to efficiently detect any changes made by him to the database
records. The method creates one or more authentication tokens, and generates one
or more validation tokens from the authentication tokens through a combination
of a hashing process and an encryption process. Once the validation tokens are
created, they are further integrated into the records in the database. The authentication
tokens are written to a secured information storage in a predetermined format by
a writing machine inaccessible by the user but accessible by the auditor. When
an authorized person such as an independent auditor who needs to check the integrity
of the records, he can detect a tampering of the records by comparing a validation
token computed from the stored validation token with the validation token integrated
in the record.