We consider the problems of data maintenance on untrusted clouds. Specifically, two important use cases: (i) using public-key encryption to enforce dynamic access control, and (ii) efficient key rotation. Enabling access revocation is key to enabling dynamic access control, and proxy re-encryption and related technologies have been advocated as tools that allow for revocation on untrusted clouds. Regrettably, the literature assumes that data is encrypted directly with the primitives. Yet, for efficiency reasons hybrid encryption is used, and such schemes are susceptible to key-scraping attacks. For key rotation, currently deployed schemes have insufficient security properties, or are computationally quite intensive. Proposed systems are either still susceptible to key-scraping attacks, or too inefficient to deploy. We propose a new notion of security that is practical for both problems. We show how to construct hybrid schemes that are both resistant to key-scraping attacks and highly efficient in revocation or key rotation. The number of modifications to the ciphertext scales linearly with the security parameter and logarithmically with the file length.
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Defending Against Key Exfiltration: Efficiency Improvements for Big-Key Cryptography via Large-Alphabet Subkey Prediction
Towards advancing the use of BIG keys as a practical defense against key exfiltration, this paper provides efficiency improvements for cryptographic schemes in the bounded retrieval model (BRM). We identify probe complexity (the number of scheme accesses to the slow storage medium storing the big key) as the dominant cost. Our main technical contribution is what we call the large-alphabet subkey prediction lemma. It gives good bounds on the predictability under leakage of a random sequence of blocks of the big key, as a function of the block size. We use it to significantly reduce the probe complexity required to attain a given level of security. Together with other techniques, this yields security-preserving performance improvements for BRM symmetric encryption schemes and BRM public-key identification schemes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1526801
- PAR ID:
- 10063400
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CCS '17 Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 923 to 940
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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