Structural signatures for tree data structures

Abstract

Data sharing with multiple parties over a third-party distribution framework requires that both data integrity and confidentiality be assured. One of the most widely used data organization structures is the tree structure. When such structures encode sensitive information (such as in XML documents), it is crucial that integrity and confidentiality be assured not only for the content, but also for the structure. Digital signature schemes are commonly used to authenticate the integrity of the data. The most widely used such technique for tree structures is the Merkle hash technique, which however is known to be "not hiding", thus leading to unauthorized leakage of information. Most techniques in the literature are based on the Merkle hash technique and thus suffer from the problem of unauthorized information leakages. Assurance of integrity and confidentiality (no leakages) of tree-structured data is an important problem in the context of secure data publishing and content distribution systems.In this paper, we propose a signature scheme for tree structures, which assures both confidentiality and integrity and is also efficient, especially in third-party distribution environments. Our integrity assurance technique, which we refer to as the "Structural signature scheme", is based on the structure of the tree as defined by tree traversals (pre-order, post-order, in-order) and is defined using a randomized notion of such traversal numbers. In addition to formally defining the technique, we prove that it protects against violations of content and structural integrity and information leakages. We also show through complexity and performance analysis that the structural signature scheme is efficient; with respect to the Merkle hash technique, it incurs comparable cost for signing the trees and incurs lower cost for user-side integrity verification.

Efficient Verifiable Range and Closest Point Queries in Zero-Knowledge

“…This threat model has received considerable attention because of applications to DNS security (see [20,25,26,32] for more details). We emphasize that in this model, zero-knowledge is a property of the proofs (as in the context of zero-knowledge sets, lists [12,19] and primary secondary resolver systems [32]) and not of the protocol.…”

Contingency Revisited: Secure Construction and Legal Implications of Verifiably Weak Integrity

“…Redactable signatures allow a third party to modify signed data by removing blocks, as introduced by Steinfeld et al in [30] and by Johnson et al in [19]. Other redactable signature schemes emerged since then, e.g., [9,24,1,22]. Second, Kiltz et al introduced append-only signatures [20].…”

“…However, not even all schemes are private, e.g. for the scheme by Kundu and Bertino [22] attacks on transparency and privacy [7] and one attacking structural integrity [29] have been given.…”

Continuous authentication on relational streams

“…Wong et al [28] enable mining of association rules on data encrypted with 1-to-n item mapping transformations. Kundu and Bertino [14] devise a technique that provides both integrity and privacy of records organized as trees (e.g., XML data). Our schemes focus only on the integrity of data.…”

“…All entries between [ and ] in newVO that correspond to this subtree are inserted into VO. Finally (lines [12][13][14][15][16], if E n is Hit, the matching value or subtree of cachedVO is appended to VO. With the new VO, the client re-computes H D P M and verifies it against the new signature.…”