Lightweight Blockchain Logging for Data-Intensive Applications
With the recent success of cryptocurrency, Blockchain’s design opens the door of building trustworthy distributed systems. A common paradigm is to repurpose the Blockchain as an append-only log that logs the application events in time order for subsequent
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Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA {ytang100,zixing,jchen133}@syr.edu Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong {chengxu,xujl}@comp.hkbu.edu.hk
Abstract. With the recent success of cryptocurrency, Blockchain’s design opens the door of building trustworthy distributed systems. A common paradigm is to repurpose the Blockchain as an append-only log that logs the application events in time order for subsequent auditing and query verification. While this paradigm reaps the security benefit, it faces technical challenges especially when being used for data-intensive applications. Instead of treating Blockchain as a time-ordered log, we propose to lay the log-structured merge tree (LSM tree) over the Blockchain for efficient and lightweight logging. Comparing other data structures, the LSM tree is advantageous in supporting efficient writes while enabling randomaccess reads. In our system design, only a small digest of an LSM tree is persisted in the Blockchain and minimal store operations are carried out by smart contracts. With the implementation in Ethereum/Solidity, we evaluate the proposed logging scheme and demonstrate its performance efficiency and effectiveness in cost saving.
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Introduction
Recent years witnessed the advent and wide adoption of the first cryptocurrency, BitCoin [3], followed by many others including Ethereum [4], Litecoin [8], Namecoin [19], etc. The initial success of cryptocurrency demonstrates the trustworthiness of Blockchain, the underlying platform of cryptocurrency. The Blockchain supports the storage and processing of cryptocurrency transactions. In abstraction, it is a trust-decentralized network storing transparent state designed with incentives to enable open membership at scale. A line of the latest research and engineering aims at applying the trustworthy design of Blockchain for applications beyond cryptocurrency. A common paradigm of repurposing Blockchain is to treat the Blockchain as a public append-only log [23], where application-level events are logged into the Blockchain in the order of time, and the log is used later for verification and auditing. While this public-log paradigm reaps the security benefit of Blockchain, it is limited to the applications handling small data c International Financial Cryptography Association 2019 A. Zohar et al. (Eds.): FC 2018 Workshops, LNCS 10958, pp. 308–324, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_21
Lightweight Blockchain Logging for Data-Intensive Applications
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(due to high Blockchain storage cost) and tolerating long verification delay (linear scanning the entire chain for verification). In this work, we tackle the research of repurposing Blockchains for hardening the security of data-intensive applications hosted in a third-party platform (e.g., cloud). A motivating scenario is to secure the cloud-based Internet-ofthings (IoT) data storage where the IoT data producers continuously generate an intensive stream of data writes to the third-party cloud storage which serves data consumers through queries. Including
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