With the swift advancement of cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), to address the issue of massive data storage, IoT devices opt to offload their data to cloud servers so as to alleviate the pressure of resident storage and computation. However, storing local data in an outsourced database is bound to face the danger of tampering. To handle the above problem, a verifiable database (VDB), which was initially suggested in 2011, has garnered sustained interest from researchers. The concept of VDB enables resource-limited clients to securely outsource extremely large databases to untrusted servers, where users can retrieve database records and modify them by allocating new values, and any attempts at tampering will be detected. This paper provides a systematic summary of VDB. First, a definition of VDB is given, along with correctness and security proofs. And the VDB based on commitment constructions is introduced separately, mainly divided into vector commitments and polynomial commitments. Then VDB schemes based on delegated polynomial functions are introduced, mainly in combination with Merkle trees and forward-secure symmetric searchable encryption. We then classify the current VDB schemes relying on four different assumptions. Besides, we classify the established VDB schemes built upon two different groups. Finally, we introduce the applications and future development of VDB. To our knowledge, this is the first VDB review paper to date.
Keywords: Commitments; Delegating polynomial functions; IoT; Verifiable database.
© 2024 The Authors.