Title
Efficient Distributed Third-Party Data Authentication for Tree Hierarchies
Abstract
In the third-party model for the distribution of data, the trusted data creator or owner provides an untrusted distributor D with integrity verification (IV) items that are stored at D in addition to the n data items. When a user U has a subset of n' of those n data items and needs to verify their integrity, U is provided by D with a number of IV items that U uses to verify its data's integrity. The model forbids U from receiving any information about the n-n' data items that the user is not authorized to access, and assumes that D has no signature authority (it stores only pre-signed IVs). Most of the published work in this area uses the Merkle tree or variants thereof, and typically requires D to store a linear or close to linear (in n) number s(n) of IV items that are pre-signed by the trusted authority. Moreover, most of the existing schemes impose on D a non-constant amount of computation work t(n) (typically logarithmic in n) in order to provide U with the IV items that enable U to verify the integrity of its data; we call h(n) the number of such IV items. The h(n) values found in the literature are non-constant, i.e., they actually do depend on the number of data items. The main contribution of this paper is to achieve linear s(n), constant h(n) and constant or logarithmic t(n) when the n data items are organized in a tree hierarchy T, and the user's subset of n' items form a subtree T'. The cases of T' considered are when T' is (i) rooted at a node v and of depth k below v; and (ii) reachable in k hops from v going both up and down in T.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/ICDCS.2008.53
ICDCS
Keywords
Field
DocType
merkle tree,n data item,data item,iv item,tree hierarchies,integrity verification,third-party data authentication,computation work,constant h,data creator,node v,user u,data integrity,government,servers,information security,distributed databases,digital signatures,authentication,data structures,generators,data security,distributed computing,message authentication,cryptography
Data structure,Authentication,Cryptography,Computer science,Tree (data structure),Computer network,Digital signature,Data integrity,Merkle tree,Hierarchy,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1063-6927
4
0.43
References 
Authors
19
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Hao Yuan1835.10
Mikhail J. Atallah23828340.54