The success of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is drawing significant interest to blockchains. A blockchain system implements a tamper-evident ledger for recording transactions that modify some global states. The system captures the entire evolution history of the states. The management of that history, also known as data provenance or lineage, has been studied extensively in database systems. However, querying data history in existing blockchains can only be done by replaying all transactions. This approach is applicable to large-scale, offline analysis, but is not suitable for online transaction processing. In this paper, we identify a new class of blockchain applications whose execution logics depend on provenance information at runtime. We first motivate the need for adding native provenance support to blockchains. We then present LineageChain, a fine-grained, secure and efficient provenance system for blockchains. LineageChain exposes lineage information to smart contracts runtime via simple and elegant interfaces that efficiently and securely support provenance-dependent contracts. LineageChain captures provenance during contract execution and stores it in a Merkle tree. LineageChain provides a novel skip list index designed for efficient provenance queries. We have implemented LineageChain on top of Fabric and a blockchain optimized storage system called ForkBase. Our extensive evaluation of LineageChain demonstrates its benefits to the new class of blockchain applications, its high query performance and its small storage overhead.

比特币和其他加密货币的成功吸引了区块链的极大兴趣。区块链系统实现了防篡改分类账，用于记录修改某些全局状态的交易。系统捕获状态的整个演化历史。在数据库系统中，对该历史的管理（也称为数据出处或沿袭）进行了广泛研究。但是，只能通过重播所有交易来查询现有区块链中的数据历史记录。此方法适用于大规模的离线分析，但不适用于在线交易处理。在本文中，我们确定了一种新型的区块链应用程序，其执行逻辑取决于运行时的出处信息。我们首先激发了向区块链添加本地出处支持的需求。然后我们提出LineageChain，一种用于区块链的细粒度，安全高效的出处系统。LineageChain通过简单而优雅的界面向智能合约运行时公开沿袭信息，这些界面可以有效，安全地支持与出处相关的合约。LineageChain在合同执行期间捕获来源，并将其存储在Merkle树中。LineageChain提供了一种新颖的跳过列表索引，专为有效的出处查询而设计。我们已经实施LineageChain织物的顶部，并呼吁ForkBase一个blockchain优化的存储系统。我们对LineageChain的广泛评估 展示了其对新型区块链应用程序的好处，其高查询性能和较小的存储开销。