VChain: Enabling verifiable boolean range queries over blockchain databases

Cheng Xu, Ce Zhang, Jianliang Xu

Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingConference proceedingpeer-review

192 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Blockchains have recently been under the spotlight due to the boom of cryptocurrencies and decentralized applications. There is an increasing demand for querying the data stored in a blockchain database. To ensure query integrity, the user can maintain the entire blockchain database and query the data locally. However, this approach is not economic, if not infeasible, because of the blockchain's huge data size and considerable maintenance costs. In this paper, we take the first step toward investigating the problem of verifiable query processing over blockchain databases. We propose a novel framework, called vChain, that alleviates the storage and computing costs of the user and employs verifiable queries to guarantee the results' integrity. To support verifiable Boolean range queries, we propose an accumulator-based authenticated data structure that enables dynamic aggregation over arbitrary query attributes. Two new indexes are further developed to aggregate intra-block and inter-block data records for efficient query verification. We also propose an inverted prefix tree structure to accelerate the processing of a large number of subscription queries simultaneously. Security analysis and empirical study validate the robustness and practicality of the proposed techniques.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2019
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages141-158
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356435
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 25 Jun 2019
Event2019 International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2019 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: 30 Jun 20195 Jul 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data
ISSN (Print)0730-8078

Conference

Conference2019 International Conference on Management of Data, SIGMOD 2019
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period30/06/195/07/19

Scopus Subject Areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems

User-Defined Keywords

  • Blockchain
  • Data integrity
  • Query processing

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