An Efficient Query Scheme for Privacy-Preserving Lightweight Bitcoin Client with Intel SGX

Abstract

In Bitcoin, lightweight clients outsource most of storage and computation tasks to full nodes in order to run on resource-limited devices. In the interaction with the full node, the lightweight client leaks considerable information about which address or transaction is relevant to it. The existing schemes to solve this problem do not support efficient yet privacy-preserving transaction search due to the fact that the blockchain is inherently inefficient for transaction query and proposed schemes perform transaction search in a block-by-block manner. Therefore, we propose an efficient transaction query scheme for the privacy-preserving lightweight client with the Intel SGX enclave running on the full node. Our main idea is to leverage the secure enclave to serve transaction-query requests from lightweight clients. However, the usage of secure enclave alone does not achieve our goals. Our scheme reorganizes the blockchain and leverages prefix tree to increase transaction-search efficiency. Due to limited capacity, the secure enclave stores reorganized blockchain data in the untrusted full node. Thus, our scheme integrates prefix tree and oblivious searching technologies to simultaneously support efficient transaction search and protect access pattern of externally stored blockchain data for the secure enclave. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that our scheme provides efficient transaction search and verification functionalities for lightweight Bitcoin clients in a privacy-preserving way.