Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) allows to delegate keyword search and file update over an encrypted database via encrypted indexes, and therefore provides opportunities to mitigate the data privacy and utilization dilemma in cloud storage platforms. Despite its merits, recent works have shown that efficient DSSE schemes are vulnerable to statistical attacks due to the lack of forward-privacy, whereas forward-private DSSE schemes suffers from practicality concerns as a result of their extreme computation overhead. Due to significant practical impacts of statistical attacks, there is a critical need for new DSSE schemes that can achieve the forward-privacy in a more practical and efficient manner. We propose a new DSSE scheme that we refer to as Forward-private Sublinear DSSE (FS-DSSE). FS-DSSE harnesses special secure update strategies and a novel caching strategy to reduce the computation cost of repeated queries. Therefore, it achieves forward-privacy, sublinear search complexity, low end-to-end delay, and parallelization capability simultaneously. We fully implemented our proposed method and evaluated its performance on a real cloud platform. Our experimental evaluation results showed that the proposed scheme is highly secure and highly efficient compared with state-of-the-art DSSE techniques. Specifically, FS-DSSE is up to three magnitude of times faster than forward-secure DSSE counterparts, depending on the frequency of the searched keyword in the database.
more »
« less
Exploiting Update Leakage in Searchable Symmetric Encryption
Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) provides efficient techniques for securely searching and updating an encrypted database. However, efficient DSSE schemes leak some sensitive information to the server. Recent works have implemented forward and backward privacy as security properties to reduce the amount of information leaked during update operations. Many attacks have shown that leakage from search operations can be abused to compromise the privacy of client queries. However, the attack literature has not rigorously investigated techniques to abuse update leakage. In this work, we investigate update leakage under DSSE schemes with forward and backward privacy from the perspective of a passive adversary. We propose two attacks based on a maximum likelihood estimation approach, the UFID Attack and the UF Attack, which target forward-private DSSE schemes with no backward privacy and Level 2 backward privacy, respectively. These are the first attacks to show that it is possible to leverage the frequency and contents of updates to recover client queries. We propose a variant of each attack which allows the update leakage to be combined with search pattern leakage to achieve higher accuracy. We evaluate our attacks against a real-world dataset and show that using update leakage can improve the accuracy of attacks against DSSE schemes, especially those without backward privacy.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1946493
- PAR ID:
- 10595300
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400704215
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 115 to 126
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Porto Portugal
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
—Searchable encryption has received a significant attention from the research community with various constructions being proposed, each achieving asymptotically optimal complexity for specific metrics (e.g., search, update). Despite their elegance, the recent attacks and deployment efforts have shown that the optimal asymptotic complexity might not always imply practical performance, especially if the application demands high privacy. In this article, we introduce a novel Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) framework called Incidence Matrix (IM)-DSSE, which achieves a high level of privacy, efficient search/update, and low client storage with actual deployments on real cloud settings. We harness an incidence matrix along with two hash tables to create an encrypted index, on which both search and update operations can be performed effectively with minimal information leakage. This simple set of data structures surprisingly offers a high level of DSSE security while achieving practical performance. Specifically, IM-DSSE achieves forward-privacy, backward-privacy, and size-obliviousness simultaneously. We also create several DSSE variants, each offering different trade-offs that are suitable for different cloud applications and infrastructures. We fully implemented our framework and evaluated its performance on a real cloud system (Amazon EC2). We have released IM-DSSE as an open-source library for wide development and adaptation.more » « less
-
Gradient leakage attacks are dominating privacy threats in federated learning, despite the default privacy that training data resides locally at the clients. Differential privacy has been the de facto standard for privacy protection and is deployed in federated learning to mitigate privacy risks. However, much existing literature points out that differential privacy fails to defend against gradient leakage. The paper presents ModelCloak, a principled approach based on differential privacy noise, aiming for safe-sharing client local model updates. The paper is organized into three major components. First, we introduce the gradient leakage robustness trade-off, in search of the best balance between accuracy and leakage prevention. The trade-off relation is developed based on the behavior of gradient leakage attacks throughout the federated training process. Second, we demonstrate that a proper amount of differential privacy noise can offer the best accuracy performance within the privacy requirement under a fixed differential privacy noise setting. Third, we propose dynamic differential privacy noise and show that the privacy-utility trade-off can be further optimized with dynamic model perturbation, ensuring privacy protection, competitive accuracy, and leakage attack prevention simultaneously.more » « less
-
In this work, we present the first database reconstruction attacks against response-hiding private range search schemes on encrypted databases of arbitrary dimensions. Falzon et al. (VLDB 2022) present a number of range-supporting schemes on arbitrary dimensions exhibiting different security and efficiency trade-offs. Additionally, they characterize a form of leakage, structure pattern leakage, also present in many one-dimensional schemes e.g., Demertzis et al. (SIGMOD 2016) and Faber et al. (ESORICS 2015). We present the first systematic study of this leakage and attack a broad collection of schemes, including schemes that allow the responses to contain false-positives (often considered the gold standard in security). We characterize the information theoretic limitations of a passive persistent adversary. Our work shows that for range queries, structure pattern leakage can be as vulnerable to attacks as access pattern leakage. We give a comprehensive evaluation of our attacks with a complexity analysis, a prototype implementation, and an experimental assessment on real-world datasets.more » « less
-
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) allows several clients to query a database held by one or more servers, such that the contents of their queries remain private. Prior PIR schemes have achieved sublinear communication and computation by leveraging computational assumptions, federating trust among many servers, relaxing security to permit differentially private leakage, refactoring effort into an offline stage to reduce online costs, or amortizing costs over a large batch of queries. In this work, we present an efficient PIR protocol that combines all of the above techniques to achieve constant amortized communication and computation complexity in the size of the database and constant client work. We leverage differentially private leakage in order to provide better trade-offs between privacy and efficiency. Our protocol achieves speedups up to and exceeding 10x in practical settings compared to state of the art PIR protocols, and can scale to batches with hundreds of millions of queries on cheap commodity AWS machines. Our protocol builds upon a new secret sharing scheme that is both incremental and non-malleable, which may be of interest to a wider audience. Our protocol provides security up to abort against malicious adversaries that can corrupt all but one party.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

