CodeLedger: a Blockchain-Based Framework for Secure Software Version Control

Version control systems (VCS) are an integral part of software development, allowing teams to track changes, manage code history, and collaborate efficiently. However, traditional VCS solutions, such as Git and SVN, face several security and integrity challenges, including centralized dependency, unauthorized modifications, and data tampering. These issues highlight the need for a more secure and transparent approach to version control. This paper introduces CodeLedger, a blockchain-based software versioning system that leverages decentralized ledger technology (DLT) to ensure tamper-proof commit histories, secure collaboration, and transparent auditing. By integrating cryptographic hashing, smart contracts, and distributed consensus mechanisms, CodeLedger eliminates single points of failure and enhances the integrity of code repositories. To evaluate the effectiveness of blockchain-based version control, this study compares CodeLedger with traditional VCS in terms of security, performance, and scalability. The proposed system is tested using various experimental setups, and results indicate that despite the storage and computational overhead of blockchain, CodeLedger provides significantly improved security and data immutability. Additionally, the paper presents a detailed survey of few research papers on blockchain applications in software engineering and discusses the potential future improvements of decentralized version control. Experimental results, performance metrics, and security evaluations are included to validate the practicality of CodeLedger in real-world development environments.