Authenticated data updates secure database queries and evidence use
Revision-Bound Evidence Cuts: Authenticated Queries and Contextual Witness Capacity
Cryptography and SecurityDatabases
Summary
Sometimes records used to support claims can be misrepresented by ignoring important details or opposing information. The authors present a way to verify both supporting and opposing evidence as data changes over time, ensuring authenticity. Their method includes certifying queries and updates, checking that evidence matches original sources even if processing methods change. They tested their system on large datasets with different query strategies, confirming consistent and secure results.
What this means in practice
- •For database administrators: Provide verifiable assurances that data queries and updates preserve authentic source evidence despite revisions and different query methods.
- •For legal compliance teams: Guarantee that digital evidence supporting claims remains authenticated and unaltered even as source datasets undergo changes or different analyses.
Authors
Faruk Alpay, Taylan Alpay
Abstract
Authentic records can support unauthorized narratives when their qualifications, query scope, or counterevidence are silently dropped. We present revision-bound evidence cuts, a framework for authenticating both supporting and opposing inference obligations across changing source versions. Signed complete-update frontiers permit transport of unaffected certificates, alternative-cut recovery, and an exact certified-reuse radius given by a frontier-hypergraph transversal number. Their source obligations induce an integral model of context-bound authorization. To secure database-derived claims, we introduce an authenticated relational query contract that binds original source records, complete selected bags, counting units, parameters, and aggregates independently of execution strategy. A full-source verifier checks 16,824 Chogha Mish records across SQLite scans, indexes, and materialized views; three valid strategies agree and eight contract/view mutations are rejected. A separate 340-row NISP cohort shows that changing the admitted weighting rule can reverse a comparison while preserving every source record. A frozen English text-to-frame compiler produces qualified evidence receipts, with linguistic accuracy evaluated separately from cryptographic integrity. We also separate logical-source from transport commitments so lossless re-encoding need not invalidate unchanged scientific evidence. The SCENE prototype evaluates signed revisions, authenticated queries, scoped disclosures, and adversarial mutations at scales reaching one million source records. These guarantees rely on declared policies and independently pinned trust roots; they authenticate specified computations and obligations, not historical truth, complete counterevidence, or institutional endorsement.