The breadth of the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) opportunities extends to HR outsourcing, logistics outsourcing, procurement outsourcing, etc, and underpinning all those opportunities is IT outsourcing. According to the Gartner Report “IT Outsourcing Market Forecast: Worldwide, 2002-2007” dated 9 March 2004, overall spending on IT outsourcing will rise from $176.8 billion in 2003 to $235.6 billion in 2007.

In database outsourcing (i.e., the "Database as a Service" model), an external service provider manages the IT infrastructure, and hosts the database and applications. To guard against wrong query results produced by a compromised or malicious service provider, there must be mechanisms for users to verify that their query results are complete (i.e., no qualifying tuples are omitted) and authentic (i.e., all the result values originated from the owner).

In this research project, we will study develop authentication schemes for SPJ queries, multi-dimensional queries and aggregate queries in data warehousing and OLAP tools. We will also explore techniques that provide assurances for query execution. We will implement a prototype system of UNOdb to demonstrate the feasibility and practicality of the proposed mechanisms.

Why use "UNOdb"? There are two reasons for using UNOdb. First, it is an acronym for Uncheatable Outsourced DataBases. Second, UNO means “one” in Spanish, and so UNOdb offers assurances to users that regardless of which outsourced databases they query from, the answers will be exactly the same as that from the owner, i.e., there is only ONE db (albeit a virtual one).