Practical authenticated pattern matching with optimal proof size

Abstract

We address the problem of authenticating pattern matching queries over textual data that is outsourced to an untrusted cloud server. By employing cryptographic accumulators in a novel optimal integrity-checking tool built directly over a suffix tree, we design the first authenticated data structure for verifiable answers to pattern matching queries featuring fast generation of constant-size proofs. We present two main applications of our new construction to authenticate: (i) pattern matching queries over text documents, and (ii) exact path queries over XML documents. Answers to queries are verified by proofs of size at most 500 bytes for text pattern matching, and at most 243 bytes for exact path XML search, independently of the document or answer size. By design, our authentication schemes can also be parallelized to offer extra efficiency during data outsourcing. We provide a detailed experimental evaluation of our schemes showing that for both applications the times required to compute and verify a proof are very small---e.g., it takes less than 10μs to generate a proof for a pattern (mis)match of 10 2 characters in a text of 10 6 characters, once the query has been evaluated.