We investigate techniques for analysis and retrieval of object trajectories in a two or three dimensional space.

In

Abstract. In an outsourced database (ODB) system the database owner publishes data through a number of remote servers, with the goal of enabling clients at the edge of the network to access and query the data more efficiently. As servers might be untrusted or can be compromised, query authentication becomes an essential component of ODB systems. In this chapter we present three techniques to authenticate selection range queries and we analyze their performance over different cost metrics. In addition, we discuss extensions to other query types.

We show how to index mobile objects in one and two dimensions using efficient dynamic external memory data structures. The problem is motivated by real life applications in traffic monitoring, intelligent navigation and mobile communications domains. For the l-dimensional case, we give (i) a dynamic, external memory algorithm with guaranteed worst case performance and linear space and (ii) a practical approximation algorithm also in the dynamic, external memory setting, which has linear space and expected logarithmic query time. We also give an algorithm with guaranteed logarithmic query time for a restricted version of the problem. We present extensions of our techniques to two dimensions. In addition we give a lower bound on the number of I/O's needed to answer the d-dimensional problem. Initial experimental results and comparisons to traditional indexing approaches are also included.

Complex networks, such as biological, social, and communication networks, often entail uncertainty, and thus, can be modeled as probabilistic graphs. Similar to the problem of similarity search in standard graphs, a fundamental problem for probabilistic graphs is to efficiently answer k-nearest neighbor queries (k-NN), which is the problem of computing the k closest nodes to some specific node.In this paper we introduce a framework for processing k-NN queries in probabilistic graphs. We propose novel distance functions that extend well-known graph concepts, such as shortest paths. In order to compute them in probabilistic graphs, we design algorithms based on sampling. During k-NN query processing we efficiently prune the search space using novel techniques.Our experiments indicate that our distance functions outperform previously used alternatives in identifying true neighbors in real-world biological data. We also demonstrate that our algorithms scale for graphs with tens of millions of edges.

In many applications that track and analyze spatiotemporal data, movements obey periodic patterns; the objects follow the same routes (approximately) over regular time intervals. For example, people wake up at the same time and follow more or less the same route to their work everyday. The discovery of hidden periodic patterns in spatiotemporal data, apart from unveiling important information to the data analyst, can facilitate data management substantially. Based on this observation, we propose a framework that analyzes, manages, and queries object movements that follow such patterns. We define the spatiotemporal periodic pattern mining problem and propose an effective and fast mining algorithm for retrieving maximal periodic patterns. We also devise a novel, specialized index structure that can benefit from the discovered patterns to support more efficient execution of spatiotemporal queries. We evaluate our methods experimentally using datasets with object trajectories that exhibit periodicity.

Recently, various protocols have been proposed for securely outsourcing database storage to a third party server, ranging from systems with "full-fledged" security based on strong cryptographic primitives such as fully homomorphic encryption or oblivious RAM, to more practical implementations based on searchable symmetric encryption or even on deterministic and order-preserving encryption. On the flip side, various attacks have emerged that show that for some of these protocols confidentiality of the data can be compromised, usually given certain auxiliary information. We take a step back and identify a need for a formal understanding of the inherent efficiency/privacy trade-off in outsourced database systems, independent of the details of the system. We propose abstract models that capture secure outsourced storage systems in sufficient generality, and identify two basic sources of leakage, namely access pattern and communication volume. We use our models to distinguish certain classes of outsourced database systems that have been proposed, and deduce that all of them exhibit at least one of these leakage sources. We then develop generic reconstruction attacks on any system supporting range queries where either access pattern or communication volume is leaked. These attacks are in a rather weak passive adversarial model, where the untrusted server knows only the underlying query distribution. In particular, to perform our attack the server need not have any prior knowledge about the data, and need not know any of the issued queries nor their results. Yet, the server can reconstruct the secret attribute of every record in the database after about N 4 queries, where N is the domain size. We provide a matching lower bound showing that our attacks are

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