On the verification of conjunctive keyword search results using authenticated crawlers

Abstract

Web of world facilitates search results on massive collection of data using Internet. While obtaining search results corresponding to a particular search query, authentication of search results becomes an important question, as different sources contribute data in every moment which are stored in (un)trusted third party servers. In this paper, we discuss on the authenticated search results of some recent works and then present an improved scheme that ensures the authenticity of the search results corresponding to a search query over Internet. The improved scheme is based on the scheme [1] that uses the concept of conjunctive keyword search. We first observe some weaknesses in [1] and then construct an improved scheme using strong authentication primitives. We show that the improved scheme can achieve better efficiency and mitigate the security weaknesses in [1]. The prototype implementation of the improved scheme shows its practicality in future Internet applications including online search engines.