Abstract

Data sharing with multiple parties over a third-party distribution framework requires that both data integrity and confidentiality be assured. One of the most widely used data organization structures is the tree structure. When such structures encode sensitive information (such as in the XML documents), it is crucial that integrity and confidentiality be assured not only for the content, but also for the structure. Digital signature schemes are commonly used to authenticate the integrity of the data. The most widely used such technique for tree structures is the Merkle hash technique, which however is known to be “not hiding”, thus leading to leakage of information. Most existing techniques for the integrity of hierarchical data structures are based on the Merkle hash technique and thus suffer from the problem of information leakages. We describe the types of leakages and inference attacks that can be carried out on the Merkle hash technique, in the context of integrity assurance. Assurance of integrity and confidentiality (no leakages) of tree-structured data is an important problem in the context of secure data publishing and content distribution systems. In this paper, we propose an integrity assurance scheme for tree data structures, which assures both confidentiality and integrity and is also efficient, especially in third-party distribution environments. Our integrity assurance technique, which we refer to as the “structural integrity assurance scheme”, is based on the structure

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