Enhanced Security for Searchable Symmetric Encryption Supporting Rich Queries

Cloud computing has greatly facilitated large-scale data outsourcing due to its cost efficiency, scalability and many other advantages. Subsequent privacy risks force data owners to encrypt sensitive data, hence making the outsourced data no longer searchable. Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) is an advanced cryptographic primitive addressing the above issue, which maintains efficient keyword search over encrypted data without disclosing much information to the storage provider. Existing SSE schemes implicitly assume that original user data is centralized, so that a searchable index can be built at once. Nevertheless, especially in cloud computing applications, user-side data centralization is not reasonable, e.g. an enterprise distributes its data in several data centers. In this paper, we propose the notion of Multi-Data-Source SSE (MDS-SSE), which allows each data source to build a local index individually and enables the storage provider to merge all local indexes into a global index afterwards. We propose a novel MDS-SSE scheme, in which an adversary only learns the number of data sources, the number of entire data files, the access pattern and the search pattern, but not any other distribution information such as how data files or search results are distributed over data sources. We offer rigorous security proof of our scheme, and report experimental results to demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme.

Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) is a mechanism that facilitates search over encrypted data that is outsourced to an untrusted Server. SSE schemes offer practicality at the expense of some information leakage.The last two years, the first dynamic SSE (DSSE) schemes, i.e. schemes that support updates, that are both forward and backward private, were introduced. Two lines of design have been proposed. The first one contains the schemes that use an oblivious data structure, i.e. the Client hides the memory access pattern from the Server. This level of security comes at the expense of significant communication overheads as the oblivious memory access requires several communication roundtrips or the use of expensive primitives that limits the potential of practicality. The second line of design contains solutions that avoid oblivious data structures.In this paper, we introduce a new DSSE solution that offers both forward and the highest level of backward privacy. Our scheme is the first one that follows the first line of design and achieves this level of security with a constant and small number of communication roundtrips. We evaluate the scheme's performance and we show that it is practical.

Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) has been proposed that enables the clients to outsource their private encrypted data onto the cloud server and later the data can be searched with limited information leakage. However, existing surveys have not covered most recent advances on SSE technique. To fill the gap, we make a survey on state-of-the-art representative SSE schemes in cloud environment. We mainly focus on dynamic SSE schemes with forward and backward privacy, two vital security elements to maintain query privacy during data update operations. Specifically, we discuss about SSE protocols based on query expressiveness, including single keyword search, conjunctive keyword search, range search, disjunctive keyword search and verifiable search. Finally, through comparison on query expressiveness, security and efficiency, we demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the existing SSE protocols.

The purpose of this thesis is to design a distributed-event based system for wireless sensor networks that constructs an overlay layer using: (1) Directional Random Walks, (2) Compressed and (3) Fragmented-Iterated Bloom Filters. Moreover, we study an innovative application to use on top of our system based on Searchable Symmetric Encryption.

Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) is an important technique for cloud computing. SSE allows encrypted critical data stored on an untrusted cloud server to be searched using keywords, returning correct data, but the keywords and data content are unknown by the server. However, an SSE database is not practical because the data is generally frequently modified even when stored on a remote server, since the server cannot update the encrypted data without decryption. Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) is designed to support this requirement. DSSE allows adding or deleting encrypted data on the server without decryption. Many DSSE systems have been proposed, based on link-list structures or blind storage (a new primitive). Each has advantages and drawbacks regarding function, extensibility, and efficiency. For a real system, the most important aspect is the tradeoff between performance and security. Therefore, we implemented several DSSE systems to compare their efficiency and security, and identify the various disadvantages with a view to developing an improved system.

Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE) schemes enable users to search over encrypted data hosted on an untrusted server. Recently, there has been a lot of interest in forward and backward private SSE. The notion of forward privacy guarantees that updates to the encrypted structure do not reveal their association to any query made in the past. Backward privacy, on the other hand, guarantees that queries do not reveal their association to deleted documents. But strong backward private schemes are known to be inefficient in terms of both communication and computation. One avenue for improvement is leveraging the power of trusted execution environments such as Intel SGX inside the untrusted server to improve some of these inefficiencies. In this work, we propose the first SGX-supported dynamic SSE constructions that are forward-private as well as backward-private. To the best of our knowledge, while there is some work on SGX-supported Oblivious RAM (ORAM) and static SSE, there is no work on SGX-supported dynamic SSE. We propose three constructions that cover all types of backward privacy in literature that are very efficient compared to the state of the art backward private schemes. Our communication complexity is always the number of current documents matching the query and we show that there is no need for 'total obliviousness' in constructions for the strongest notion of backward privacy.

Cryptographic Primitives that Resist Backdooring and Subversion

Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) enables users to efficiently search ciphertext in the cloud and ensures the security of encrypted data. Recent works show that forward security is an important property in dynamic SSE. Many forward secure searchable symmetric encryption (FSSE) schemes supporting single-keyword search have been proposed. Only a few SSE schemes can satisfy the forward security and support conjunctive keyword search at the same time, which are realized by adopting inefficient or complicated cryptography tools. Very recently, Hu proposed a novel construction to achieve conjunctive-keyword search, that is, using inner-product encryption (IPE) to design a conjunctive-keyword FSSE scheme. However, IPE scheme is a conceptually complex and low efficient scheme. In this paper, we use a more efficient cryptographic tool, asymmetric scalar-product-preserving encryption (ASPE), to design an efficient and secure conjunctive-keyword FSSE scheme. To improve practicality, we design our scheme to support multi-user setting. Our scheme achieves sub-linear efficiency, and can easily be used in any single-keyword FSSE scheme to obtain a conjunctive-keyword FSSE scheme supporting multi-user. Compared with the current conjunctive-keyword FSSE scheme, our scheme has a better update and search efficiency.

Dynamic multi-client searchable symmetric encryption with support for boolean queries

With the wide spread of Cloud service, users are outsourcing their data to the third party servers. When we delegate our data to the cloud servers, there is such a potential risk that the data stored in the servers is stolen. If the data are stored in the encrypted form, the damage caused by data theft is low because the data will not leak to other parties. However, a new problem arises, that is, users are not able to operate encrypted data, which loses the merit of cloud computing. To solve such a problem, searchable symmetric encryption(SSE) is proposed. SSE is a cryptographic protocol that can execute keyword search over encrypted documents without decrypting them. Secure Indexes is one of realizations of SSE that provides constant time keyword search per document with the help of pseudo-random function and Bloom filters. However, Secure Indexes dose not support addition and deletion of documents. Tekin and Sahin proposed an improved Secure Indexes scheme that supports addition and deletion by employing Bloom filter and counting Bloom filter. The drawback of their scheme is that these operations are implemented in user side, which is not desired in the cloud computing since the aim of cloud computing is to delegate as many operations as possible. This paper proposes new SSE scheme. The proposed scheme also employ counting Bloom filter, but provide more fine-grained operations compared to the scheme by Tekin and Sahin in the sense that the proposed scheme provides not only search documents but add and delete the elements of document. Moreover, these operations are executed in the server side. The performance of the proposed SSE is comparable to the existing scheme which provides constant time for search, add and delete per document. We also implemented this SSE scheme, and verified that the scheme performed well not only theoretically but also in practice.

An efficient conjunctive keyword searchable encryption for cloud-based IoT systems

The cloud-assisted intelligent systems have attracted extensive attention due to their powerful data analysis and computation capabilities. However, how to handle encrypted data remains a challenging problem in intelligent systems. A promising solution is searchable symmetric encryption (SSE), which enables a client to privately outsource their data to the cloud while preserving keyword search functionality. In practice, dynamic SSE is more practical and supports efficient data addition and deletion. Unfortunately, data update will leak some additional information which can be exploited to break data privacy. To address this issue, forward and backward secure SSE schemes are proposed to reduce the leakage of data update. That is, forward security guarantees that the newly updated documents cannot reveal the previously searched keywords, while backward security guarantees that the server cannot recover the deleted documents. However, the existing forward and backward secure SSE schemes mainly consider curious-but-honest server. How to verify the soundness and completeness of search results is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a noninteractive verifiable dynamic SSE scheme with forward and backward security from two universal accumulators. Specifically, the server in our scheme only needs one roundtrip to return the nondeleted search results to the client, which saves the communication overhead dramatically. Besides, our scheme can achieve public verification that anyone can verify the search results but not only the client who has the private key. Finally, we give a formal security analysis and compare the proposed scheme with other related work, the results show that our scheme can achieve the desired security properties with practical efficiency.

Cloud computing offers a cost-efficient data analytics platform. This is enabled by constant innovations in tools and technologies for analyzing large volumes of data through distributed batch processing systems and real-time data through distributed stream processing systems. However, due to the sensitive nature of data, many organizations are reluctant to analyze their data in public clouds. To address this stalemate, both software-based and hardware-based solutions have been proposed yet all have substantial limitations in terms of efficiency, expressiveness, and security. In this thesis, we present solutions that enable practical and expressive confidentiality- preserving batch and stream-based analytics. We achieve this by performing computations over encrypted data using Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) and Property-Preserving Encryption (PPE) in novel ways, and by utilizing remote or Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based trusted services where needed.We introduce a set of extensions and optimizations to PHE and PPE schemes and propose the novel abstraction of Secure Data Types (SDTs) which enables the application of PHE and PPE schemes in ways that improve performance and security. These abstractions are leveraged to enable a set of compilation techniques making data analytics over encrypted data more practical. When PHE alone is not expressive enough to perform analytics over encrypted data, we use a novel planner engine to decide the most efficient way of utilizing client-side completion, remote re-encryption, or trusted hardware re-encryption based on Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) to overcome the limitations of PHE. We also introduce two novel symmetric PHE schemes that allow arithmetic operations over encrypted data. Being symmetric, our schemes are more efficient than the state-of-the-art asymmetric PHE schemes without compromising the level of security or the range of homomorphic operations they support. We apply the aforementioned techniques in the context of batch data analytics and demonstrate the improvements over previous systems. Finally, we present techniques designed to enable the use of PHE and PPE in resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices and demonstrate the practicality of stream processing over encrypted data.

Searchable encryption allows us to perform a keyword search over encrypted data. However, we cannot efficiently perform some complex search (e.g., a wildcard search) with traditional searchable encryption schemes because they can deal with only equality matches. Our symmetric searchable encryption can deal with partial matches. This allows us to efficiently perform a wildcard search, partial match search, and so on. We also examine the feasibility of our scheme by experiments on a smartphone and tablet, and confirm our scheme can be used in these environments. Availability on portable devices will offer high convenience. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Security of cloud storage has drawn more and more concerns. In the searchable encryption, many previous solutions can let people retrieve the documents containing single keyword or conjunctive keywords by storing encrypted documents with data indexes. However, searching documents with a phrase or consecutive keywords is still a remained open problem. In this paper, using the relative positions, we propose an efficient scheme LPSSE with symmetric searchable encryption that can support encrypted phrase searches in cloud storage. Our scheme is based on non-adaptive security definition by R. Curtmola and with lower costs of transmission and storage than existing systems. Furthermore, we combine some components of currently efficient search engines and our functions to complete a prototype. The experiment results also show that our scheme LPSSE is available and efficient.