Security issues in Outsourced Graph Databases: Query Authentication and Privacies

Speaker: Byron Choi, Hong Kong Baptist University

Time: 14:00-15:30 p.m., Jan. 16, 2015

Venue: Room 202, Second Floor, Office Building, Software Campus

Host: Xiaohui Yu

Abstract: Graphs have given rise to many emerging applications including biological and chemical databases, social networks, co-purchase networks, and information networks.  Due to the cost of hosting the explosive volume of graph data and performing large-scale computations, the owners of graph databases may not always have the necessary IT infra-structure and expertise to provide the best usage of their data. A recent attempt has been to outsource costly computation to a query service provider (SP), who is often equipped with powerful clusters, to provide query as a service (QaaS). However, the SP may be untrusted and/or compromised by attacks. In this talk, we shall introduce the well-received system models of graph database outsourcing, assumptions and their variations. On top of these system models, we shall present subgraph query authentication mechanisms, that prove (i) the results returned by the SP are indeed generated from the outsourced databases; and (ii) no results is omitted by the SP. In the second part of the talk, we shall summarize current techniques for privacies of subgraph queries. In a nutshell, clients' queries are preserved from the SP and/or the data at the SP is preserved from the clients, whereas queries can still be processed at the SP side. The talk will end with an outlook of the research.

** This is a joint work with Dr. Yun Peng (QLUT), Dr. Sourav S Bhowmick (Nanyang Tech.), Prof. Jianliang Xu (HKBU) and Zhe Fan (HKBU).

Short biography: Dr. Byron Choi obtained his Ph.D and MSE degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and 2002, respectively. He received his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Dr. Byron Choi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University. Before joining Hong Kong Baptist University, he was an Assistant Professor with School of Computer Engineering / Nanyang Technological University (NTU) from 2005 to 2008. He was a research associate at the University of Edinburgh in 2005 and a summer student intern for the Galax project at AT&T Labs Florham Park. He visited HKUST theoretical computer science group in 2003. He is a member of ACM and IEEE. His research interests include graph-structured databases, XML, incremental maintenance algorithms and view updates and database security.  His publications appear in TKDE, VLDBJ, SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE, etc before. Dr. Choi has recently served as a reviewer of TKDE, VLDBJ, VLDB, and ICDE, etc.