Principal Investigator:
Roberto Tamassia, PhD, Professor
Department of Computer Science
Brown University
Providence, RI
Brief Description:
Cloud services are fast becoming a vital part of today’s computing reality. Millions of online users manage their personal data through remote cloud storage and services such as Gmail and Google docs. Internet-based applications are offered and managed by third-party service providers such as Amazon S3, EC2 and SimpleDB Web services. As more end-user applications consume information that comes from unknown machines, verifying the integrity of operations on remotely stored data is crucial for the future viability and development of cloud computing.
For example, how can we ensure that a keyword search on cloud-based data returns results that are accurate and complete?
This invention will securely authenticate the correctness, completeness, and integrity of results returned by a keyword search on a document collection, calendar, email collection, or database stored by a web service. More broadly, the invention can be used to build trusted cloud computing applications. The heart of this technology is its efficiency. This is the first technology to achieve optimality in several critical performance measures: (1) the verification overhead at the client is optimal; (2) the update overhead at the source is constant; (3) the bandwidth consumption is optimal; and (4) the storage usage is optimal.
Information:
US patent 8,572,385 is issued (10/29/2013).