Efficient and Secure Data Sharing Scheme on Interoperable Blockchain Database

Abstract

Interoperable Blockchain Database (IBD) can enable users to execute transactions for sharing data stored in various blockchains maintained by different organizations or communities in a transparent manner. However, compared to traditional distributed databases, IBD can hardly provide high-level security and scalability, which are caused by many factors, such as system architecture, consensus protocol, and interactive pattern. Among them, the consensus protocol is the most critical factor, since the credibility of consensus nodes inside the corresponding blockchains are difficult to be guaranteed. Additionally, the consensus protocol directly affects the verification efficiency for given transactions in IBD. In this paper, we formally concern the problem of secure data sharing in IBD. We present a scheme named <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Hybridchain</i> to execute transactions for sharing data securely and efficiently. We first propose a novel concept named <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Interoperable Consensus Group</i> (ICG) which organizes a set of basic consensus nodes into a group, each of which is responsible for managing at least one local blockchain. Then, we present an interoperable cross-chains consensus protocol to achieve eventual consistency of blockchain transactions. We conduct extensive experiments, and the evaluation results show that our proposed approach achieves superior performance.