ZTE

ZTE Communications ›› 2016, Vol. 14 ›› Issue (S0): 10-20.doi: 10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2016.S0.002

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Verification of Substring Searches on the Untrusted Cloud

Faizal Riaz-ud-Din, Robin Doss   

  1. School of Information Technology,Deakin University,Burwood,VIC 3125,Australia
  • Received:2016-04-09 Online:2016-06-01 Published:2019-11-29
  • About author:Faizal Riaz-ud-Din (faizal.din@ieee.org) has a background in database and software development. He has been working in academia as well as in industry for a number of years and is currently pursuing a doctorate part-time. His interests lie in the area of query verification in databases and text-based data on the cloud.
    Robin Doss (robin.doss@deakin.edu.au) received the BEng from the University of Madras, India, in 1999, and the MEng and PhD degrees from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia, in 2000 and 2004, respectively. He has held professional appointments with Ericsson Australia, RMIT University, and IBM Research, Switzerland. He joined Deakin University, Australia, in 2003, and is currently a senior lecturer in computing. Since 2003, he has published more than 50 papers in refereed international journals, international conference proceedings and technical reports for industry and government. His current research interests are in the broad areas of communication systems, protocol design, wireless networks, security and privacy. He is a member of the IEEE.

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Abstract: Ensuring the correctness of answers to substring queries has not been a concern for consumers working within the traditional confines of their own organisational infrastructure. This is due to the fact that organisations generally trust their handling of their own data hosted on their own servers and networks. With cloud computing however, where both data and processing are delegated to unknown servers, guarantees of the correctness of queries need to be available. The verification of the results of substring searches has not been given much focus to date within the wider scope of data and query verification. We present a verification scheme for existential substring searches on text files, which is the first of its kind to satisfy the desired properties of authenticity, completeness, and freshness. The scheme is based on suffix arrays, Merkle hash trees and cryptographic hashes to provide strong guarantees of correctness for the consumer, even in fully untrusted environments. We provide a description of our scheme, along with the results of experiments conducted on a fully-working prototype.

Key words: substring search, query verification, cloud