Subtraction of Hyperledger Fabric: A blockchain-based lightweight storage mechanism for digital evidences

Abstract

After more than ten years of development, the application of blockchain has expanded beyond the financial field to include other sectors such as E-government and the medical field. One of the most renowned blockchain platforms is Hyperledger Fabric, which is widely adopted by existing works for managing digital evidences ($DE$s). However, these works overlook the distinct differences between $DE$s and token-transfer transactions and often adopt the full implementation of Hyperledger Fabric, leveraging chaincode to manage the hash of $DE$s while keeping the original data off-chain to conserve storage resources. This approach poses challenges such as off-chain data loss, reduced data verification efficiency, and increased resource consumption. In this paper, we introduce a lightweight storage mechanism called Blockchain $Zhengju$ Keeper (BZK) that addresses these issues. In BZK, we subtract Hyperledger Fabric by (1) modifying the endorsement policy to reduce the risk of off-chain data loss, (2) simplifying the $DE$ upload-onchain process while keeping the parallel execution, and (3) abandoning chaincode for $DE$ verification to reduce latency. Comprehensive simulation experiments demonstrate the practicality of the proposed mechanism. Furthermore, compared to Hyperledger Fabric, BZK can reduce storage resource consumption by 68% and lower verification latency by 97%.