Efficient and Scalable Integrity Verification of Data and Query Results for Graph Databases

Graphs are used for representing and understanding objects and their relationships for numerous applications such as social networks, Semantic Webs, and biological networks. Integrity assurance of data and query results for graph databases is an essential security requirement. In this paper, we propose two efficient integrity verification schemes—HMACs for graphs (gHMAC) for two-party data sharing, and redactable HMACs for graphs (rgHMAC) for third-party data sharing, such as a cloud-based graph database service. We compute one HMAC value for both the schemes and two other verification objects for rgHMAC scheme that are shared with the verifier. We show that the proposed schemes are provably secure with respect to integrity attacks on the structure and/or content of graphs and query results. The proposed schemes have linear complexity in terms of the number of vertices and edges in the graphs, which is shown to be optimal. Our experimental results corroborate that the proposed HMAC-based schemes for graphs are highly efficient as compared to the digital signature-based schemes—computation of HMAC tags is about 10 times faster than the computation of digital signatures.