Toward a Secure, Rich, and Fair Query Service for Light Clients on Public Blockchains

Abstract

The rapid growth of storage overhead on public blockchains has urged the use of light clients that only store a small fraction of blockchain data and rely on other bootstrapped full nodes for data retrievals. Unfortunately, current blockchain light client designs are far from satisfactory. First, outsourcing retrieval requests could raise severe concerns about result correctness and privacy threats. Second, current light clients do not support rich query and enforce fee payments to full nodes. Given that blockchain storage increases day by day, enabling effective rich blockchain queries and fairly compensating full nodes’ ever growing costs has become extremely necessary. In this article, we propose a general and secure paid query framework to simultaneously meet those demands above. Specifically, we leverage the integration of trusted hardware (e.g., Intel SGX) and smart contract as a starting point for building efficient yet secure query processing with fair payments. Then, we further craft several crucial performance and security refinement designs to boost query efficiency and enforce result correctness, and also explore an enclave-facilitated fair settlement mechanism for on-chain cost optimizations. We implement a prototype of our paid query framework and the experimental result has demonstrated its practically affordable cost.