Query Access Assurance in Outsourced Databases

Query execution assurance is an important concept in defeating lazy servers in the database as a service model. We show that extending query execution assurance to outsourced databases with multiple data owners is highly inefficient. To cope with lazy servers in the distributed setting, we propose query access assurance (QAA) that focuses on IO-bound queries. The goal in QAA is to enable clients to verify that the server has honestly accessed all records that are necessary to compute the correct query answer, thus eliminating the incentives for the server to be lazy if the query cost is dominated by the IO cost in accessing these records. We formalize this concept for distributed databases, and present two efficient schemes that achieve QAA with high success probabilities. The first scheme is simple to implement and deploy, but may incur excessive server to client communication cost and verification cost at the client side, when the query selectivity or the database size increases. The second scheme is more involved, but successfully addresses the limitation of the first scheme. Our design employs a few number theory techniques. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency, effectiveness, and usefulness of our schemes.