A General Model for Authenticated Data Structures

Query answers from on-line databases can easily be corrupted by hackers or malicious database publishers. Thus it is important to provide mechanisms which allow clients to trust the results from on-line queries. Authentic publication allows untrusted publishers to answer securely queries from clients on behalf of trusted off-line data owners. Publishers validate answers using hard-to-forge verification objects (VOs), which clients can check efficiently. This approach provides greater scalability, by making it easy to add more publishers, and better security, since on-line publishers do not need to be trusted. To make authentic publication attractive, it is important for the VOs to be small, efficient to compute, and efficient to verify. This has lead researchers to develop independently several different schemes for efficient VO computation based on specific data structures. Our goal is to develop a unifying framework for these disparate results, leading to a generalized security resul...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: ALGORITHMICA
• Authors: Charles U. Martel, Glen Nuckolls, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Michael Gertz, April Kwong, Stuart G. Stubblebine
• Keywords: ALGORITHMICA 2004, Authentic Publication, Publishers, Search DAGs