Query authentication over cloud data from multiple contributors

Abstract

As data stored in the cloud may encounter the malicious attack from the cloud service provider (CSP), to ensure data authenticity and integrity, it is necessary to authenticate the query results from CSP. However, most existing authentication methods focus on query over data from a single contributor in the outsourced database. This paper puts forward authentication method for query over data from multiple contributors in the cloud environment. The method can validate data from multiple contributors on only one authentication data structure (ADS) based on Merkle Hash Tree (MHT), which achieves low storage costs and high computational efficiency. Experimental results show that our mechanism can efficiently enable query authentication over cloud data from multiple contributors. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.