Security and privacy techniques for outsourced and distributed databases

Database outsourcing has become an important research topic in recent years because of the large volume of data that needs to be distributed or hosted to serve client applications. This dissertation studies data integrity, privacy and key management problems in the context of outsourced databases. Most of our research work is related to certain kinds of range query problems in database indexing. The goal of the research is to develop efficient algorithms and data structures to satisfy data security and privacy requirements when performing such range queries.In the outsourced database model, the owner of the data uses third party databases to distribute the data or allow clients to query the databases. There are many challenges in this model. For example, how does the client verify the completeness and correctness of the query results when the third parties are untrusted? How to protect the privacy of sensitive data (e.g., medical databases) on the third parties' servers? How to enforce access control on public databases? We address these challenges, and provide efficient solutions for them. Some of our results have potential applications in cloud computing environments.