A Trust-Based Probabilistic Method for Efficient Correctness Verification in Database Outsourcing

Correctness verification of query results is a significant challenge in database outsourcing. Most of the proposed approaches impose high overhead, which makes them impractical in real scenarios. Probabilistic approaches are proposed in order to reduce the computation overhead pertaining to the verification process. In this paper, we use the notion of trust as the basis of our probabilistic approach to efficiently verify the correctness of query results. The trust is computed based on observing the history of interactions between clients and the service provider. Our approach exploits Merkle Hash Tree as an authentication data structure. The amount of trust value towards the service provider leads to investigating just an appropriate portion of the tree. Implementation results of our approach show that considering the trust, derived from the history of interactions, provides a tradeoff between performance and security, and reduces the imposed overhead for both clients and the service provider in database outsourcing scenario.