An Authentication Algorithm for Sets of Spatial Data Objects

Data play a pivotal role in supporting both national economic development and scientific research, and ensuring their authenticity and integrity has become a key concern for scholars. To this end, various authentication algorithms, such as digital signatures, message authentication codes, and hash functions have been proposed. Many of these algorithms treat data as a unity, which can lead to different authentication results if the elements order of the data changes. However, spatial data object is a point set that lack a predetermined order, varying data acquisition and management systems used by operators may result in the same data appearing in different orders, and these approaches are no longer effective. Therefore, this study proposes an authentication algorithm for spatial data objects based on set nature. We consider spatial data objects as a data set, and each element in set will be transferred into a string data. Then, we use hash function SHA to compute each string data, and perform XOR operation to obtain message M. Finally, the final hash code is obtained by computing M using the SHA. Through tampering experiments, it has been shown this algorithm has the property of ignoring the data order, good sensitivity, diffusion, confusion, and security. This algorithm can overcome the limitations that rely on data order, contribute to improving the authentication process for spatial data objects, and enhance data integrity and reliability in various applications.