Modeling Integrity in Data Exchange

We provide a formal model of security guarantees offered by digital signature schemes when they are applied to structured data. This model is an important step towards managing the integrity of data that is shared, integrated, transformed, and exchanged on the World Wide Web. We express signature semantics using well-known database constraints, which can help authors decide what to sign, help recipients evaluate the integrity of signed data, and clarify the capabilities of different signature technologies.