FalconDB: Blockchain-based Collaborative Database

Nowadays an emerging class of applications are based on collaboration over a shared database among different entities. However, the existing solutions on shared database may require trust on others, have high hardware demand that is unaffordable for individual users, or have relatively low performance. In other words, there is a trilemma among security, compatibility and efficiency. In this paper, we present FalconDB, which enables different parties with limited hardware resources to efficiently and securely collaborate on a database. FalconDB adopts database servers with verification interfaces accessible to clients and stores the digests for query/update authentications on a blockchain. Using blockchain as a consensus platform and a distributed ledger, FalconDB is able to work without any trust on each other. Meanwhile, FalconDB requires only minimal storage cost on each client, and provides anywhere-available, real-time and concurrent access to the database. As a result, FalconDB overcomes the disadvantages of previous solutions, and enables individual users to participate in the collaboration with high efficiency, low storage cost and blockchain-level security guarantees.