XFlat: Query friendly encrypted XML view publishing

Abstract

The security of the published XML data receives high attention due to the sensitive nature of the data in some areas. This paper proposes an XML view publishing method called XFlat. Compared with other methods, XFlat focuses on the efficiency of query evaluation over the published XML view. XFlat decomposes a XML tree into a set of sub-trees with the same accessibility on each node to all users, encrypts and stores each sub-tree in a flat sequential way. This storage strategy can avoid the nested encryption in view construction and decryption in the query evaluation. In addition, we discuss how to generate the user specific schema and minimize the total space cost of XML view with the consideration of the size of the relationship among the sub-trees. The final experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.