| title: | Cryptographic methods to achieve soundness of database queries |
|---|---|
| reg no: | ETF5568 |
| project type: | Estonian Science Foundation research grant |
| subject: |
2.9. System Engineering and Computer Technology |
| status: | completed |
| institution: | Cybernetica AS |
| head of project: | Ahto Buldas |
| duration: | 01.01.2003 - 31.12.2004 |
| description: | Today (in Estonia and elsewhere) more and more state registers and databases delegate their management functions to private sector - a phenomenon which in addition to its positive impact also creates some additional security problems. Databases and Registers need to be protected not only against outside attackers but also against modification by the holders (of the Register). Even if the reliability and trustworthiness of the holder (as a legal person) is never called into question, we know that technical systems (databases among them) are maintained and built by ordinary people (physical persons) the honesty of whose can never be taken for granted. Regardless of technical methods being incapable of preventing false data in databases, one is still able to prevent databases giving contradictory answers to queries by using recently developed cryptographic techniques. The research team of Cybernetica first proposed such techniques in few years ago. During 2001-2002, the research on these techniques was supported by Estonian Science Foundation (grant 4760 Long-term authenticity of queries in databases and registers ). The methods proposed to date were capable of preventing contradictory queries in the sense that a register gives different answers to two identical queries (during a fixed period of time). In this work, we plan to extend the existing methods so that more general forms of contradictions were excluded, encountering the fact that in real databases the queries are not independent. For example the answer to the query "all persons not taller than 1.80" comprises as a subset the answer of "all women not taller than 1.80". The goal of this work is to find efficient (in size and time) cryptographic methods capable of preventing contradictions caused by dependencies of queries for different classes of databases and query languages. It may happen that for some classes several substantially different methods exist. In the latter case, we plan to determine more precisely which method is more efficient in which situation (depending on the distribution of the content of databases and on the frequencies of different queries). |
| project group | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| no | name | institution | position | |
| 1. | Arne Ansper | Cybernetica AS | researcher | |
| 2. | Ahto Buldas | Cybernetica AS | senior researcher | |
| 3. | Peeter Laud | Cybernetica AS /Tartu University | senior researcher | |
| 4. | Monika Oit | Cybernetica AS | research dir. | |
| 5. | Valdo Praust | Data Protection Inspection | advisor | |
| 6. | Uuno Puus | Cybernetuca AS | head of lab. | |
| 7. | Meelis Roos | Cybernetica AS | researcher | |
| 8. | Asko Seeba | Cybernetica AS | researcher | |