New Publicly Verifiable Databases with Efficient Updates

The notion of verifiable database (VDB) enables a resource-constrained client to securely outsource a very large database to an untrusted server so that it could later retrieve a database record and update it by assigning a new value. Also, any attempt by the server to tamper with the data will be detected by the client. Very recently, Catalano and Fiore [17] proposed an elegant framework to build efficient VDB that supports public verifiability from a new primitive named vector commitment. In this paper, we point out Catalano-Fiore’s VDB framework from vector commitment is vulnerable to the so-called forward automatic update (FAU) attack. Besides, we propose a new VDB framework from vector commitment based on the idea of commitment binding. The construction is not only public verifiable but also secure under the FAU attack. Furthermore, we prove that our construction can achieve the desired security properties.