Practical Immutable Signature Bouquets (PISB) for authentication and integrity in outsourced databases

Abstract

Database outsourcing is a prominent trend that enables organizations to offload their data management overhead (e.g., query handling) to the external service providers. Immutable signatures are ideal tools to provide authentication and integrity for such applications with an important property called immutability. Signature immutability ensures that, no attacker can derive a valid signature for unposed queries from previous queries and their corresponding signatures. This prevents an attacker from creating his own de-facto services via such derived signatures. Unfortunately, existing immutable signatures are very computation and communication costly (e.g., highly interactive), which make them impractical for task-intensive and heterogeneous applications. In this paper, we developed two new schemes that we call Practical and Immutable Signature Bouquets (PISB ), which achieve efficient immutability for outsourced database systems. Both PISB schemes are very simple, non-interactive, and computation/communication efficient. Our generic scheme can be constructed from any aggregate signature coupled with a standard signature. Hence, it can flexibly provide performance trade-offs for various types of applications. Our specific scheme is constructed from Condensed-RSA and Sequential Aggregate RSA. It has a very low verifier computational overhead and end-to-end delay with a small signature size. We showed that PISB schemes are secure and also much more efficient than previous alternatives. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.