Query assurance verification for outsourced multi-dimensional databases

Abstract

In data outsourcing model, data owners engage third-party data servers (called publishers) to manage their data and process queries on their behalf. As these publishers may be untrusted or susceptible to attacks, it could produce incorrect query results to users. In this paper, we introduce an authentication scheme for outsourced multi-dimensional databases. With the proposed scheme, users can verify that their query answers from a publisher are complete (i.e., no qualifying tuples are omitted) and authentic (i.e., all the result values are legitimate). In addition, our scheme guarantees minimality (i.e., no non-answer points are returned in the plain). Our scheme supports window, range, kNN and RNN queries on multi-dimensional databases. We have implemented the proposed scheme, and our experimental results on kNN queries show that our approach is a practical scheme with low overhead. © 2009 IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.