Biblio

We consider information leakage to the user in private information retrieval (PIR) systems. Information leakage can be measured in terms of individual message leakage or total leakage. Individual message leakage, or simply individual leakage, is defined as the amount of information that the user can obtain on any individual message that is not being requested, and the total leakage is defined as the amount of information that the user can obtain about all the other messages except the one being requested. In this work, we characterize the tradeoff between the minimum download cost and the individual leakage, and that for the total leakage, respectively. Coding schemes are proposed to achieve these optimal tradeoffs, which are also shown to be optimal in terms of the message size. We further characterize the optimal tradeoff between the minimum amount of common randomness and the total leakage. Moreover, we show that under individual leakage, common randomness is in fact unnecessary when there are more than two messages.

Third-party IME (Input Method Editor) apps are often the preference means of interaction for Android users' input. In this paper, we first discuss the insecurity of IME apps, including the Potentially Harmful Apps (PHA) and malicious IME apps, which may leak users' sensitive keystrokes. The current defense system, such as I-BOX, is vulnerable to the prefix-substitution attack and the colluding attack due to the post-IME nature. We provide a deeper understanding that all the designs with the post-IME nature are subject to the prefix-substitution and colluding attacks. To remedy the above post-IME system's flaws, we propose a new idea, pre-IME, which guarantees that "Is this touch event a sensitive keystroke?" analysis will always access user touch events prior to the execution of any IME app code. We designed an innovative TrustZone-based framework named IM-Visor which has the pre-IME nature. Specifically, IM-Visor creates the isolation environment named STIE as soon as a user intends to type on a soft keyboard, then the STIE intercepts, translates and analyzes the user's touch input. If the input is sensitive, the translation of keystrokes will be delivered to user apps through a trusted path. Otherwise, IM-Visor replays non-sensitive keystroke touch events for IME apps or replays non-keystroke touch events for other apps. A prototype of IM-Visor has been implemented and tested with several most popular IMEs. The experimental results show that IM-Visor has small runtime overheads.