Efficient Query Verification on Outsourced Data: A Game-Theoretic Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic framework to ensure correct query results from cloud data outsourcing, significantly reducing verification complexity by designing incentive structures that deter dishonest behavior.

Contribution

It presents a novel game-theoretic approach to incentivize honest computation in outsourced data queries, applicable to both single and multiple service scenarios.

Findings

Incentive structures can effectively eliminate the motivation to cheat.

A simple verification method suffices to enforce honest behavior.

Experimental results confirm the approach's efficiency and effectiveness.

Abstract

To save time and money, businesses and individuals have begun outsourcing their data and computations to cloud computing services. These entities would, however, like to ensure that the queries they request from the cloud services are being computed correctly. In this paper, we use the principles of economics and competition to vastly reduce the complexity of query verification on outsourced data. We consider two cases: First, we consider the scenario where multiple non-colluding data outsourcing services exist, and then we consider the case where only a single outsourcing service exists. Using a game theoretic model, we show that given the proper incentive structure, we can effectively deter dishonest behavior on the part of the data outsourcing services with very few computational and monetary resources. We prove that the incentive for an outsourcing service to cheat can be reduced to zero. Finally, we show that a simple verification method can achieve this reduction through extensive experimental evaluation.