Let’s Make a Hash Chain in SQLite

David Eisinger, Development Director

Article Category: #Code

Posted on

Hash chains are at the core of blockchain technology. How do they work, and how can we use them to ensure data integrity in a simple relational database?

I'm not much of a cryptocurrency enthusiast, but there are some neat ideas in these protocols that I wanted to explore further. Based on my absolute layperson's understanding, the "crypto" in "cryptocurrency" describes three things:

  1. Some public key/private key stuff to grant access to funds at an address;
  2. For certain protocols (e.g. Bitcoin), the cryptographic puzzles1 that miners have to solve in order to add new blocks to the ledger; and
  3. The use of hashed signatures to ensure data integrity.

Of those three uses, the first two (asymmetric cryptography and proof-of-work) aren't that interesting to me, at least from a technical perspective. The third concept, though — using cryptography to make data verifiable and tamper-resistant — that's pretty cool, and something I wanted to dig into. I decided to build a little proof-of-concept using SQLite, a "small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine."

A couple notes before we dive in: these concepts aren't unique to the blockchain; Wikipedia has good explanations of cryptographic hash functions, Merkle trees, and hash chains if any of this piques your curiosity. This stuff is also at the core of git, which is really pretty neat.

Onto the code #

Implementing a rudimentary hash chain in SQL is pretty simple. Here's my approach, which uses "bookmarks" as an arbitrary record type.

PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON;
SELECT load_extension("./sha1");

CREATE TABLE bookmarks (
  id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  signature TEXT NOT NULL UNIQUE
    CHECK(signature = sha1(url || COALESCE(parent, ""))),
  parent TEXT,
  url TEXT NOT NULL UNIQUE,
  FOREIGN KEY(parent) REFERENCES bookmarks(signature)
);

CREATE UNIQUE INDEX parent_unique ON bookmarks (
  ifnull(parent, "")
);

This code is available on GitHub in case you want to try this out on your own. Let's break it down a little bit.

  • First, we enable foreign key constraints, which aren't on by default
  • Then we pull in SQLite's sha1 function, which implements a common hashing algorithm
  • Then we define our table
    • id isn't mandatory but makes it easier to grab the last entry
    • signature is the SHA1 hash of the bookmark URL and parent entry's signature; it uses a CHECK constraint to ensure this is guaranteed to be true
    • parent is the signature of the previous entry in the chain (notice that it's allowed to be null)
    • url is the data we want to ensure is immutable (though as we'll see later, it's not truly immutable since we can still do cascading updates)
  • We set a foreign key constraint that parent refers to another row's signature unless it's null
  • Then we create a unique index on parent that covers the NULL case, since our very first bookmark won't have a parent, but no other row should be allowed to have a null parent, and no two rows should be able to have the same parent

Next, let's insert some data:

INSERT INTO bookmarks (url, signature) VALUES ("google", sha1("google"));

WITH parent AS (SELECT signature FROM bookmarks ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1)
INSERT INTO bookmarks (url, parent, signature) VALUES (
  "yahoo", (SELECT signature FROM parent), sha1("yahoo" || (SELECT signature FROM parent))
);

WITH parent AS (SELECT signature FROM bookmarks ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1)
INSERT INTO bookmarks (url, parent, signature) VALUES (
  "bing", (SELECT signature FROM parent), sha1("bing" || (SELECT signature FROM parent))
);

WITH parent AS (SELECT signature FROM bookmarks ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1)
INSERT INTO bookmarks (url, parent, signature) VALUES (
  "duckduckgo", (SELECT signature FROM parent), sha1("duckduckgo" || (SELECT signature FROM parent))
);

OK! Let's fire up sqlite3 and then .read this file. Here's the result:

sqlite> SELECT * FROM bookmarks;
+----+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+------------+
| id |                signature                 |                  parent                  |    url     |
+----+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+------------+
| 1  | 759730a97e4373f3a0ee12805db065e3a4a649a5 |                                          | google     |
| 2  | 64633167b8e44cb833fbfa349731d8a68e942ebc | 759730a97e4373f3a0ee12805db065e3a4a649a5 | yahoo      |
| 3  | ce3df1337879e85bc488d4cae129719cc46cad04 | 64633167b8e44cb833fbfa349731d8a68e942ebc | bing       |
| 4  | 675570ac126d492e449ebaede091e2b7dad7d515 | ce3df1337879e85bc488d4cae129719cc46cad04 | duckduckgo |
+----+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+------------+

This has some cool properties. I can't delete an entry in the chain:

sqlite> DELETE FROM bookmarks WHERE id = 3;
Error: FOREIGN KEY constraint failed

I can't change a URL:

sqlite> UPDATE bookmarks SET url = "altavista" WHERE id = 3;
Error: CHECK constraint failed: signature = sha1(url || parent)

I can't re-sign an entry:

sqlite> UPDATE bookmarks SET url = "altavista", signature = sha1("altavista" || parent) WHERE id = 3;
Error: FOREIGN KEY constraint failed

I can, however, update the last entry in the chain:

sqlite> UPDATE bookmarks SET url = "altavista", signature = sha1("altavista" || parent) WHERE id = 4;
sqlite> SELECT * FROM bookmarks;
+----+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+-----------+
| id |                signature                 |                  parent                  |    url    |
+----+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+-----------+
| 1  | 759730a97e4373f3a0ee12805db065e3a4a649a5 |                                          | google    |
| 2  | 64633167b8e44cb833fbfa349731d8a68e942ebc | 759730a97e4373f3a0ee12805db065e3a4a649a5 | yahoo     |
| 3  | ce3df1337879e85bc488d4cae129719cc46cad04 | 64633167b8e44cb833fbfa349731d8a68e942ebc | bing      |
| 4  | b583a025b5a43727978c169fe99f5422039194ea | ce3df1337879e85bc488d4cae129719cc46cad04 | altavista |
+----+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+-----------+

This is because a row isn't really "locked in" until it's pointed to by another row. It's worth pointing out that an actual blockchain would use a consensus mechanism to prevent any updates like this, but that's way beyond the scope of what we're doing here.

Cascading updates #

Given that we can change the last row, it's possible to update any row in the ledger provided you 1) also re-sign all of its children and 2) do it all in a single pass. Here's how you'd update row 2 to "askjeeves" with a RECURSIVE query (and sorry I know this is a little hairy):

WITH RECURSIVE
  t1(url, parent, old_signature, signature) AS (
    SELECT "askjeeves", parent, signature, sha1("askjeeves" || COALESCE(parent, ""))
    FROM bookmarks WHERE id = 2
    UNION
    SELECT t2.url, t1.signature, t2.signature, sha1(t2.url || t1.signature)
    FROM bookmarks AS t2, t1 WHERE t2.parent = t1.old_signature
  )
UPDATE bookmarks
SET url = (SELECT url FROM t1 WHERE t1.old_signature = bookmarks.signature),
    parent = (SELECT parent FROM t1 WHERE t1.old_signature = bookmarks.signature),
    signature = (SELECT signature FROM t1 WHERE t1.old_signature = bookmarks.signature)
WHERE signature IN (SELECT old_signature FROM t1);

Here's the result of running this update:

+----+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+-----------+
| id |                signature                 |                  parent                  |    url    |
+----+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+-----------+
| 1  | 759730a97e4373f3a0ee12805db065e3a4a649a5 |                                          | google    |
| 2  | de357e976171e528088843dfa35c1097017b1009 | 759730a97e4373f3a0ee12805db065e3a4a649a5 | askjeeves |
| 3  | 1b69dff11f3e8ffeade0f42521f9e1bd1bd78539 | de357e976171e528088843dfa35c1097017b1009 | bing      |
| 4  | 924660e4f25e2ac8c38ca25bae201ad3a5b6e545 | 1b69dff11f3e8ffeade0f42521f9e1bd1bd78539 | altavista |
+----+------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------+-----------+

As you can see, row 2's url is updated, and rows 3 and 4 have updated signatures and parents. Pretty cool, and pretty much the same thing as what happens when you change a git commit via rebase — all the successive commits get new SHAs.

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I'll be honest that I don't have any immediately practical uses for a cryptographically-signed database table, but I thought it was cool and helped me understand these concepts a little bit better. Hopefully it gets your mental wheels spinning a little bit, too. Thanks for reading!

  1. Here's a pretty good explanation of what mining really is, but, in a nutshell, it's running a hashing algorithm over and over again with a random salt until a hash is found that begins with a required number of zeroes.  ↩︎

David Eisinger

David is Viget's managing development director. From our Durham, NC, office, he builds high-quality, forward-thinking software for PUMA, the World Wildlife Fund, NFLPA, and many others.

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