Vulnerabilities in similarity search based systems Ali Saman Tosun and Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Image similarity search systems Abstract Similarity based queries are common in several modern database applications, such as multimedia, scientific, and biomedical databases. In most of these systems, database responds with the tuple with the closest match according to some metric. In this paper we investigate some important security issues related to similarity search in databases. We investigate the vulnerability of such systems against users who try to copy the database by sending automated queries. We analyze two models for similarity search, namely reply model and score model. Reply model responds with the tuple with best match and score model responds with only the score of similarity search. For these models we analyze possible ways of attacks and strategies that can be used to detect attacks. Our analysis shows that in score model it is much easier to plug the vulnerabilities than in reply model. Sophisticated attacks can easily be used in reply model and the database is limited in capability to prevent such attacks. DiSC'03 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery