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

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%.