ICCSNT 2015

Title:
Authentication of Spatial Queries in Both Vector Spaces and Spatial Networks

Abstract:
With the popularity of location-based services and the abundant usage of smart phones and GPS-enabled devices, the necessity of outsourcing spatial data has grown rapidly over the past few years. Meanwhile, the fast arising trend of Cloud storage and Cloud computing services has provided a flexible and cost-effective platform for hosting data from businesses and individuals, further enabling many location-based applications. Nevertheless, in this database outsourcing paradigm, the authentication of the query results at the client remains a challenging problem. In this talk, I will focus on the Outsourced Spatial Database (OSDB) model and introduce an efficient scheme, called VN-Auth, which allows a client to verify the correctness and completeness of the result set in both vector spaces and spatial networks. The approach is based on neighborhood information derived from the Voronoi diagram of the underlying spatial dataset and can handle fundamental spatial query types, such as k nearest neighbor and range queries, as well as more advanced query types like reverse k nearest neighbor, aggregate nearest neighbor, and spatial skyline. We evaluated VN-Auth based on real-world datasets using mobile devices (Google Droid smart phones with Android OS) as query clients. Compared to the current state-of-the-art approaches (i.e., methods based on Merkle hash trees), our experiments show that VN-Auth produces significantly smaller verification objects and is more computationally efficient.