Toward Materials Genome Big-Data: A Blockchain-Based Secure Storage and Efficient Retrieval Method

With the advent of the era of data-driven material R&D, more and more countries have begun to build material Big Data sharing platforms to support the design and R&D of new materials. In the application process of material Big Data sharing platforms, storage and retrieval are the basis of resource mining and analysis. However, achieving efficient storage and recovery is not accessible due to the multimodality, isomerization, discrete and other characteristics of material data. At the same time, due to the lack of security mechanisms, how to ensure the integrity and reliability of the original data is also a significant problem faced by researchers. Given these issues, this paper proposes a blockchain-based secure storage and efficient retrieval scheme. Introducing the Improved Merkle Tree (MMT) structure into the block, the transaction data on the chain and the original data in the off-chain cloud are mapped through the material data template. Experimental results show that our proposed MMT structure has no significant impact on the block creation efficiency while improving the retrieval efficiency. At the same time, MMT is superior to state-of-the-art retrieval methods in terms of efficiency, especially regarding range retrieval. The method proposed in this paper is more suitable for the application needs of the material Big Data sharing platform, and the retrieval efficiency has also been significantly improved.