Authenticating the Query Results of Text Search Engines

• Main Authors: PANG, Hwee Hwa, MOURATIDIS, Kyriakos
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2008
• Subjects: Authentication scheme; Document Retrieval; Empirical evaluations; Inverted list; Query results; Search results; Text search; Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/423; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/1422/viewcontent/VLDB08_TNRA.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.