TrustRAG: Blockchain-Enhanced RAG via Committee-Based Credibility Scoring

Abstract

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) lets Large Language Models (LLMs) pull in up-to-date, domain-specific information instead of relying only on what they were trained on. Yet most RAG systems still draw from centralized databases with limited oversight, making it difficult to verify where a document came from, whether it has been tampered with, or whether it should be trusted at all. This is a serious problem in domains where both the timeliness and accuracy of retrieved content are critical, such as healthcare, finance, logistics, and legal case law, where a wrong or manipulated document can directly lead to bad decisions. We present TrustRAG, a committee-based, blockchain-backed RAG system: before a document is used, it is certified by a committee of domain experts through a zero-knowledge protocol, and the committee's hidden scores are combined via secure multi-party computation into a trust score that any client can verify. These scores, along with the underlying document data, are maintained jointly across chains through hash commitments, so no document or score can be silently altered or dropped, and every ranking can be independently replayed and checked.