Data outsourcing or database as a service is a new paradigm for data management in which a third party service provider hosts a database as a service. The service provides data management for its customers and thus obviates the need for the service user to purchase expensive hardware and software, deal with software upgrades and hire professionals for administrative and maintenance tasks. Since using an external database service promises reliable data storage at a low cost it is very attractive for companies. Such a service would also provide universal access, through the Internet to private data storedat reliable and secure sites. A client would store their data, and not need to carry their data with them as they travel. They would also not need to log remotely to their home machines, which may suffer from crashes and be unavailable. However, recent governmental legislations, competition among companies, and database thefts mandate companies to use secure and privacy preserving data management techniques. The data provider, therefore, needs to guarantee that the data is secure, be able to execute queries on the data, and the results of the queries must also be secure and not visible to the data provider. Current research has been focused only on how to index and query encrypted data. However, querying encrypted data is computationally very expensive. \emph{Providing an efficient trust mechanism} to push both database service providers and clients to behave honestly has emerged as one of the most important problem before data outsourcing to become a viable paradigm. In this paper, we describe scalable privacy preserving algorithms for data outsourcing. Instead of encryption, which is computationally expensive, we use distribution on multiple data provider sites and information theoretically proven secret sharing algorithms as the basis for privacy preserving outsourcing. The technical contributions of this paper is the establishment and development of a framework for efficient fault-tolerant scalable and theoretically secure privacy preserving data outsourcing that supports a diversity of database operations executed on different types of data, which can even leverage publicly available data sets.

Several data management challenges arise in the context of Internet advertising networks, where Internet advertisers pay Internet publishers to display advertisements on their Web sites and drive traffic to the advertisers from surfers' clicks. Although advertisers can target appropriate market segments, the model allows dishonest publishers to defraud the advertisers by simulating fake traffic to their own sites to claim more revenue. This paper addresses the case of publishers launching fraud attacks from numerous machines, which is the most widespread scenario. The difficulty of uncovering these attacks is proportional to the number of machines and resources exploited by the fraudsters. In general, detecting this class of fraud entails solving a new data mining problem, which is finding correlations in multidimensional data. Since the dimensions have large cardinalities, the search space is huge, which has long allowed dishonest publishers to inflate their traffic, and deplete the advertisers' advertising budgets. We devise the approximate SLEUTH algorithms to solve the problem efficiently, and uncover single-publisher frauds. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SLEUTH both analytically and by reporting some of its results on the Fastclick network, where numerous fraudsters were discovered.

Data integration from multiple autonomous data sources has emerged as an important practical problem. The key requirement for such data integration is that owners of such data need to cooperate in a competitive landscape in most of the cases. The research challenge in developing a query processing solution is that the answers to the queries need to be provided while preserving the privacy of the data sources. In general, allowing unrestricted read access to the whole data may give rise to potential vulnerabilities as well as may have legal implications. Therefore, there is a need for privacy preserving database operations for querying data residing at different parties. In this paper, we propose a new query processing technique using third parties in a peer-to-peer system. We propose and evaluate two different protocols for various database operations. Our scheme is able to answer queries without revealing any useful information to the data sources or to the third parties. Analytical comparison of the proposed approach with other recent proposals for privacy-preserving data integration establishes the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of query response times.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems research has gained considerable attention recently with the increasing popularity of file sharing applications. Since these applications are used for sharing huge amounts of data, it is very important to efficiently locate the data of interest in such systems. However, these systems usually do not provide efficient search techniques. Existing systems offer only keyword search functionality through a centralized index or by query flooding. In this paper, we propose a scheme based on reference vectors for sharing multi-dimensional data in P2P systems. This scheme effectively supports a larger set of query operations (such as k-NN queries and content-based similarity search) than current systems, which generally support only exact key lookups and keyword searches.The basic idea is to store multiple replicas of an object's index at different peers based on the distances between the object's feature vector and the reference vectors. Later, when a query is posed, the system identifies the peers that are likely to store the index information about relevant objects using reference vectors. Thus the system is able to return accurate results by contacting a small fraction of the participating peers.

Current Web service discovery methods are based on centralized approaches where Web services are identified based on service functionality. Examples of service functionality include car rental, hotel booking and book selling. Since higher level Web services are increasingly composed in terms of lower level Web services, it is important that service discovery not only be based on service functionality but also be based on process behavior, i.e., how a service functionality is served. Furthermore, centralized approaches to service discovery suffer from problems such as high operational and maintenance cost, single point of failure, and scalability. Another issue that has not been considered in current Web service discovery paradigms is the issue of trust and quality of service of the service provider. We, therefore, propose a structured peer-to-peer framework for Web service discovery in which Web services are located based on both service functionality and process behavior. In addition, we integrate a scalable reputation model in this distributed peer-to-peer framework to rank Web services based on both trust and service quality.