Visible to the public Pollution Attacks on Counting Bloom Filters for Black Box Adversaries

TitlePollution Attacks on Counting Bloom Filters for Black Box Adversaries
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsReviriego, Pedro, Rottenstreich, Ori
Conference Name2020 16th International Conference on Network and Service Management (CNSM)
Date Publishednov
KeywordsBlack Box Attacks, Bloom filter, Complexity theory, composability, field programmable gate arrays, Hash functions, Integrated circuit modeling, Metrics, Pollution, pollution attacks, pubcrawl, Resiliency, security, Technological innovation
AbstractThe wide adoption of Bloom filters makes their security an important issue to be addressed. For example, an attacker can increase their error rate through polluting and eventually saturating the filter by inserting elements that set to one a large number of positions in the filter. This is known as a pollution attack and requires that the attacker knows the hash functions used to construct the filter. Such information is not available in many practical settings and in addition a simple protection can be achieved through using a random salt in the hash functions. The same pollution attacks can also be done to counting Bloom filters that in addition to insertions and lookups support removals. This paper considers pollution attacks on counting Bloom filters. We describe two novel pollution attacks that do not require any knowledge of the counting Bloom filter implementation details and evaluate them. These methods show that a counting Bloom filter is vulnerable to pollution attacks even when the attacker has only access to the filter as a black box to perform insertions, removals, and lookups.
DOI10.23919/CNSM50824.2020.9269076
Citation Keyreviriego_pollution_2020