Secure Hashing-Based Verifiable Pattern Matching

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information forensics and security Vol. 13; no. 11; pp. 2677 - 2690
• Main Authors: Fei Chen, Donghong Wang, Ronghua Li, Jianyong Chen, Zhong Ming, Liu, Alex X., Huayi Duan, Cong Wang, Jing Qin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.11.2018
• Subjects: accumulator; Cryptography; Data structures; hashing; Java; Outsourcing; Pattern matching; Pattern matching outsourcing; Servers; Spatial databases; verifiability
• ISSN: 1556-6013; 1556-6021
• DOI: 10.1109/TIFS.2018.2825141

Verifiable pattern matching is the problem of finding a given pattern verifiably from the outsourced textual data, which is resident in an untrusted remote server. This problem has drawn much attention due to a large number of applications. The state-of-the-art method for this problem suffers from low efficiency. To enable fast verifiable pattern matching, we propose a novel scheme in this paper. Our scheme is based on an ordered set accumulator data structure and a newly developed verifiable suffix array structure, which only involves fast cryptographic hash computations. Our scheme also supports fast multiple-occurrence pattern matching. A striking feature of our proposed scheme is that our scheme works even with no secret keys, which ensures public verifiability. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed scheme using Java. The results show that our scheme is orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art work. Specifically, our scheme with public verifiability only costs a preprocessing time of 47 s (merely one-time off-line cost during outsourcing), a search time of 30 μs, a verification time of 149 μs, and a proof size of 2760 bytes for a verifiable pattern matching query with pattern length 200 on 10-million long textual data which consists of sequences of two-byte, Unicode characters in Java.