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A query integrity assurance scheme for accessing outsourced spatial databases

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Abstract

With the trend of cloud computing, outsourcing databases to third party service providers is becoming a common practice for data owners to decrease the cost of managing and maintaining databases in-house. In conjunction, due to the popularity of location-based-services (LBS), the need for spatial data (e.g., gazetteers, vector data) is increasing dramatically. Consequently, there is a noticeably new tendency of outsourcing spatial datasets by data collectors. Two main challenges with outsourcing datasets are to keep the data private (from the data provider) and to ensure the integrity of the query result (for the clients). Unfortunately, most of the techniques proposed for privacy and integrity do not extend to spatial data in a straightforward manner. Hence, recent studies proposed various techniques to support either privacy or integrity (but not both) on spatial datasets. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a technique that can ensure both privacy and integrity for outsourced spatial data. In particular, we first use a one-way spatial transformation method based on Hilbert curves, which encrypts the spatial data before outsourcing and, hence, ensures its privacy. Next, by probabilistically replicating a portion of the data and encrypting it with a different encryption key, we devise a technique for the client to audit the trustworthiness of the query results. We show the applicability of our approach for both k-nearest-neighbor queries and spatial range queries, which are the building blocks of any LBS application. We also design solutions to guarantee the freshness of outsourced spatial databases. Finally, we evaluate the validity and performance of our algorithms with security analyses and extensive simulations.

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Acknowledgements

This research has been funded in part by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) grants IIS-0238560 (PECASE), IIS-0534761, IIS-0742811, CNS-0831502 (CT), and CNS-0831505 (CT), CNS-0855251 (CRI), UT-Battelle grant (UT-B-4000087151), and in part from the METRANS Transportation Center, under grants from USDOT and Caltrans. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 36849, USA

    Wei-Shinn Ku

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Ling Hu & Cyrus Shahabi

  3. Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing Sigma Center, Beijing, China, 100190

    Haixun Wang

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  1. Wei-Shinn Ku
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  2. Ling Hu
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  3. Cyrus Shahabi
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  4. Haixun Wang
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Correspondence to Wei-Shinn Ku.

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Ku, WS., Hu, L., Shahabi, C. et al. A query integrity assurance scheme for accessing outsourced spatial databases. Geoinformatica 17, 97–124 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-012-0156-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-012-0156-9

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