Verifiable social data outsourcing

Social data outsourcing is an emerging paradigm for effective and efficient access to the social data. In such a system, a third-party Social Data Provider (SDP) purchases complete social datasets from Online Social Network (OSN) operators and then resells them to data consumers who can be any individuals or entities desiring the complete social data satisfying some criteria. The SDP cannot be fully trusted and may return wrong query results to data consumers by adding fake data and deleting/modifying true data in favor of the businesses willing to pay. In this paper, we initiate the study on verifiable social data outsourcing whereby a data consumer can verify the trustworthiness of the social data returned by the SDP. We propose three schemes for verifiable queries over outsourced social data. The three schemes all require the OSN provider to generate some cryptographic auxiliary information, based on which the SDP can construct a verification object for the data consumer to verify the query-result trustworthiness. They differ in how the auxiliary information is generated and how the verification object is constructed and verified. Extensive experiments based on a real Twitter dataset confirm the high efficacy and efficiency of our schemes.