Paper 2013/814

RDAS: A Symmetric Key Scheme for Authenticated Query Processing in Outsourced Databases

Lil Maria Rodriguez-Henriquez and Debrup Chakraborty

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of authenticated query processing in outsourced databases. An authenticated query processing mechanism allows a client to verify the validity of the query responses that it gets from an untrusted and remote server, who stores the client's database on its behalf. We introduce a general framework called RDAS for the problem of authenticated query processing, and define the security goals for this task in line with concrete provable security. We propose several schemes which enable a client to verify both the completeness and correctness of the query responses of a server. All the schemes follow the proposed framework and are provably secure in terms of the proposed security definition. The novelty of the proposed schemes is that they use bitmap indexes as a main component for providing authentication. Bitmap indexes have recently seen lot of applications for accelerated query processing and many commercial databases implement such indexes. Bitmaps have not been previously used for a security goal. We show that the proposed schemes can match in both functionality and efficiency compared to the existing schemes. We also implement the schemes on a real database and provide extensive experimental studies on the schemes