A Secure and Trusted Query Framework for Consortium Blockchain

As blockchain technology advances, the requirement for data storage in blockchains has significantly increased due to the full replication mechanism, which hinders scalability. A hybrid on-chain and off-chain storage approach has emerged as a promising solution to address this issue. However, this hybrid storage model introduces new challenges: (1) how to ensure the trustworthiness of queries, and (2) how to guarantee the completeness of query results. To tackle these challenges, we propose a secure and trustworthy query framework based on consortium blockchain, supporting two types of verifiable query mechanisms. The first verification mechanism is based on Byzan-tine Fault Tolerance (BFT), ensuring the accuracy and integrity of query results through consensus. The second mechanism uses an Authenticated Data Structure (ADS), verifying the reliability of query results by comparing the hash values of on-chain block headers with off-chain data. Experiment results indicate that the response latencies of BFT and ADS under the Smallbank workload are 16 ms and 29 ms, respectively, demonstrating both high efficiency and performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/Seafoodair/DistributedQuery.