Authenticating the query results of text search engines

  • Authors:
  • HweeHwa Pang;Kyriakos Mouratidis

  • Affiliations:
  • Singapore Management University;Singapore Management University

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The number of successful attacks on the Internet shows that it is very difficult to guarantee the security of online search engines. A breached server that is not detected in time may return incorrect results to the users. To prevent that, we introduce a methodology for generating an integrity proof for each search result. Our solution is targeted at search engines that perform similarity-based document retrieval, and utilize an inverted list implementation (as most search engines do). We formulate the properties that define a correct result, map the task of processing a text search query to adaptations of existing threshold-based algorithms, and devise an authentication scheme for checking the validity of a result. Finally, we confirm the efficiency and practicality of our solution through an empirical evaluation with real documents and benchmark queries.