Practical Range Minimum Queries Revisited

Finding the position of the minimal element in a subarray A[i..j] of an array A of size n is a fundamental operation in many applications. In 2011, Fischer and Heun presented the first index of size 2n+o(n) bits which answers the operation in constant time for any subarray. The index can be computed in linear time and queries can be answered without consulting the original array. The most recent and currently fastest practical index is due to Ferrada and Navarro (DCC\u2716). It reduces the range minimum query (RMQ) to more fundamental and well studied queries on binary vectors, namely rank and select, and a RMQ query on an array of sublinear size derived from A. A range min-max tree is employed to solve this recursive RMQ call. In this paper, we review their practical design and suggest a series of changes which result in consistently faster query times. Specifically, we provide a customized select implementation, switch to two levels of recursion, and use the sparse table solution for the recursion base case instead of a range min-max tree. We provide an extensive empirical evaluation of our new implementation and also compare it to the state of the art. Our experimental study shows that our proposal significantly outperforms the previous solutions on established benchmarks (up to a factor of three) and furthermore accelerates real world applications such as traversing a succinct tree or listing all distinct elements in an interval of an array

Simple and Efficient Fully-Functional Succinct Trees

The fully-functional succinct tree representation of Navarro and Sadakane (ACM Transactions on Algorithms, 2014) supports a large number of operations in constant time using $2n+o(n)$ bits. However, the full idea is hard to implement. Only a simplified version with $O(\log n)$ operation time has been implemented and shown to be practical and competitive. We describe a new variant of the original idea that is much simpler to implement and has worst-case time $O(\log\log n)$ for the operations. An implementation based on this version is experimentally shown to be superior to existing implementations

SoK: Cryptographically Protected Database Search

Protected database search systems cryptographically isolate the roles of reading from, writing to, and administering the database. This separation limits unnecessary administrator access and protects data in the case of system breaches. Since protected search was introduced in 2000, the area has grown rapidly; systems are offered by academia, start-ups, and established companies. However, there is no best protected search system or set of techniques. Design of such systems is a balancing act between security, functionality, performance, and usability. This challenge is made more difficult by ongoing database specialization, as some users will want the functionality of SQL, NoSQL, or NewSQL databases. This database evolution will continue, and the protected search community should be able to quickly provide functionality consistent with newly invented databases. At the same time, the community must accurately and clearly characterize the tradeoffs between different approaches. To address these challenges, we provide the following contributions: 1) An identification of the important primitive operations across database paradigms. We find there are a small number of base operations that can be used and combined to support a large number of database paradigms. 2) An evaluation of the current state of protected search systems in implementing these base operations. This evaluation describes the main approaches and tradeoffs for each base operation. Furthermore, it puts protected search in the context of unprotected search, identifying key gaps in functionality. 3) An analysis of attacks against protected search for different base queries. 4) A roadmap and tools for transforming a protected search system into a protected database, including an open-source performance evaluation platform and initial user opinions of protected search.Comment: 20 pages, to appear to IEEE Security and Privac

From Theory to Practice: Plug and Play with Succinct Data Structures

Engineering efficient implementations of compact and succinct structures is a time-consuming and challenging task, since there is no standard library of easy-to- use, highly optimized, and composable components. One consequence is that measuring the practical impact of new theoretical proposals is a difficult task, since older base- line implementations may not rely on the same basic components, and reimplementing from scratch can be very time-consuming. In this paper we present a framework for experimentation with succinct data structures, providing a large set of configurable components, together with tests, benchmarks, and tools to analyze resource requirements. We demonstrate the functionality of the framework by recomposing succinct solutions for document retrieval.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 3 table