Certification and Authentication of Data Structures

We study query authentication schemes, algorithmic and cryptographic constructions that provide efficient and secure protocols for verifying the results of queries over structured data in untrusted or adversarial data distribution environments. We formally define the problem in a new data query and authentication setting that involves general query types answered in the RAM model of computation, and put forward a new approach for designing secure query authentication schemes that, through the new concept of query certification, aims to authenticate the validity of the answer, rather than the entire process that generates the answer. Our main results state that this new authentication framework achieves generality, namely any query type admits a secure query authentication scheme, and also supports an important type of modularity, namely the authentication of general queries based on the evaluation of relations over the data elements is reduced to the authentication of set-membership q...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: AMW
• Authors: Roberto Tamassia, Nikos Triandopoulos
• Keywords: AMW 2010, Knowledge Management, Query Authentication Scheme, Query Type, Secure Query Authentication