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Lightweight Blockchain Logging for Data-Intensive Applications

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Book cover Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10958))

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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 random-access 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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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this work, the words of “compaction” and “merge” are interchangeably used.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

    Yuzhe (Richard) Tang, Zihao Xing & Ju Chen

  2. Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

    Cheng Xu & Jianliang Xu

Authors
  1. Yuzhe (Richard) Tang
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  2. Zihao Xing
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  3. Cheng Xu
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  4. Ju Chen
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  5. Jianliang Xu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuzhe (Richard) Tang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

    Aviv Zohar

  2. Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Ittay Eyal

  3. University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Vanessa Teague

  4. Concordia University, Beaconsfield, QC, Canada

    Jeremy Clark

  5. Computer Science and Mathematics, Stirling University, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Bracciali

  6. Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Federico Pintore

  7. Department of Mathematics, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

    Massimiliano Sala

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© 2019 International Financial Cryptography Association

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Tang, Y.(., Xing, Z., Xu, C., Chen, J., Xu, J. (2019). Lightweight Blockchain Logging for Data-Intensive Applications. In: Zohar, A., et al. Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10958. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-58820-8_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-58819-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-58820-8

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