Light Repository Blockchain System with Multisecret Sharing for Industrial Big Data

Blockchain is an emerging technology that promises many exciting applications in various fields, including financial, medical, energy, and logistics management. However, there are still some limitations in the existing blockchain framework that prevents its widespread adoption in the commercial world. One important limitation is the storage requirement, wherein each blockchain node has to store a copy of the distributed ledger. Thus, as the number of transactions increases, this storage requirement grows quadratically, eventually limiting the scalability of a blockchain system. Moreover, the public ledger in a blockchain framework allows anyone in the network to audit the transaction, which may not be favourable in some privacy-sensitive applications. In this paper, a secret-sharing scheme is proposed to reduce the size of the blockchain transactions. Each transaction block is divided into t parts, and the size of each part is 1/t size of transaction block. We use the secret-sharing mechanism to share t parts into n shares. Hence, each node stores not one transaction but one share in the blockchain system. The proposed scheme can eventually reduce the storage cost of a blockchain transaction by 1/t without introducing an additional recovery communication cost; however, robustness is reduced in node failure as a tradeoff. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme was more efficient and secure compared to other state-of-the-art schemes that aim to reduce blockchain storage for industrial big data.