Scalable Verification for Outsourced Dynamic Databases

Query answers from servers operated by third parties need to be verified, as the third parties may not be trusted or their servers may be compromised. Most of the existing authentication methods construct validity proofs based on the Merkle hash tree (MHT). The MHT, however, imposes severe concurrency constraints that slow down data updates. We introduce a protocol, built upon signature aggregation, for checking the authenticity, completeness and freshness of query answers. The protocol offers the important property of allowing new data to be disseminated immediately, while ensuring that outdated values beyond a pre-set age can be detected. We also propose an efficient verification technique for ad-hoc equijoins, for which no practical solution existed. In addition, for servers that need to process heavy query workloads, we introduce a mechanism that significantly reduces the proof construction time by caching just a small number of strategically chosen aggregate signatures. The efficiency and efficacy of our proposed mechanisms are confirmed through extensive experiments. 1

A symmetric cryptographic scheme for data integrity verification in cloud databases

Cloud database services represent a great opportunity for companies and organizations in terms of management and cost savings. However, outsourcing private data to external providers leads to risks of confidentiality and integrity violations. We propose an original solution based on encrypted Bloom filters that addresses the latter problem by allowing a cloud service user to detect unauthorized modifications to his outsourced data. Moreover, we propose an original analytical model that can be used to minimize storage and network overhead depending on the database structure and workload. We assess the effectiveness of the proposal as well as its performance improvements with respect to existing solutions by evaluating storage and network costs through micro-benchmarks and the TPC-C workload standard