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Efficient and secure exact-match queries in outsourced databases

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Abstract

Data management can now be outsourced to cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services or IBM SmartCloud. This calls for encrypted data-representation schemes that also give way to efficient query processing. State-of-the-art approaches are overly expensive for exact-match queries in the worst case, or they do not ensure privacy if an adversary knows the data distribution. In this paper, we propose a new privacy approach without these shortcomings. It makes use of encryption, obfuscated indices, and data fragmentation. To speed up query processing, we propose three novel data-transformation and query-execution schemes. For two schemes, we prove that an adversary capable of solving any polynomial problem cannot determine if any attribute values appear together in a tuple. Thus, with our schemes, sensitive data is not linked to personally identifiable information. To evaluate our third scheme, we propose a measure that quantifies the risk of disclosure. We evaluate our approach on real-world folksonomy data. Our evaluation shows that its average response time of exact-match queries with 15 million tuples is under one second on a conventional desktop PC.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute for Program Structures and Data Organization (IPD), Am Fasanengarten 5, 76131, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Clemens Heidinger, Klemens Böhm, Erik Buchmann & Martin Spoo

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  1. Clemens Heidinger
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  2. Klemens Böhm
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  3. Erik Buchmann
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  4. Martin Spoo
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Correspondence to Clemens Heidinger.

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Heidinger, C., Böhm, K., Buchmann, E. et al. Efficient and secure exact-match queries in outsourced databases. World Wide Web 18, 567–605 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-013-0270-0

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