Trust-preserving set operations

We describe a method for performing trust-preserving set operations by untrusted parties. Our motivation for this is the problem of securely reusing content-based search results in peer-to-peer networks. We model search results and indexes as data sets. Such sets have value for answering a new query only if they are trusted. In the absence of any system-wide security mechanism, a data set is trusted by a node a only if it was generated by some node which is trusted by a. Our main contributions are a formal definition of the problem as well as an efficient scheme that solves this problem by allowing untrusted peers to perform set operations on trusted data sets while also producing unforgeable proofs of correctness. This is accomplished by requiring trusted nodes to sign appropriately-defined digests of generated sets; each such digest consists of an RSA accumulator and a Bloom filter. The scheme is general, and has other applications as well. We give an analysis demonstrating the low overhead of the scheme, and we include experimental data which confirm the analysis.