Enabling Generic Verifiable Aggregate Query on Blockchain Systems

Abstract

Currently, users in a blockchain system must maintain all the data on the blockchain and query the data locally to ensure the integrity of the query results. However, since data is updated in an append-only way, resulting in a huge amount of data, it will take considerable maintenance costs to users. In this paper, we present an approach to support verifiable aggregate queries on blockchain systems that alleviates both storage and computing costs for users, while ensuring the integrity of the query results. We design an accumulator-based authenticated data structure (ADS) that supports verifiable multidimensional aggregate queries (i.e., aggregate queries with multiple selection predicates). The structure is built for each block, based on which verifiable multidimensional aggregate queries within a single block or involving multiple blocks are supported. We further optimize the performance by merging ADSs on different blocks to reduce the verification time at the client side and reduce the verification object (VO) size. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.