Biblio

Dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) that enables a client to perform searches and updates on encrypted data has been intensively studied in cloud computing. Recently, forward privacy and backward privacy has engaged significant attention to protect DSSE from the leakage of updates. However, the research in this field almost focused on keyword-level updates. That is, the client needs to know the keywords of the documents in advance. In this paper, we proposed a document-level update scheme, DBP, which supports immediate deletion while guaranteeing forward privacy and backward privacy. Compared with existing forward and backward private DSSE schemes, our DBP scheme has the following merits: 1) Practicality. It achieves deletion based on document identifiers rather than document/keyword pairs; 2) Efficiency. It utilizes only lightweight primitives to realize backward privacy while supporting immediate deletion. Experimental evaluation on two real datasets demonstrates the practical efficiency of our scheme.

Recently, several practical attacks raised serious concerns over the security of searchable encryption. The attacks have brought emphasis on forward privacy, which is the key concept behind solutions to the adaptive leakage-exploiting attacks, and will very likely to become a must-have property of all new searchable encryption schemes. For a long time, forward privacy implies inefficiency and thus most existing searchable encryption schemes do not support it. Very recently, Bost (CCS 2016) showed that forward privacy can be obtained without inducing a large communication overhead. However, Bost's scheme is constructed with a relatively inefficient public key cryptographic primitive, and has poor I/O performance. Both of the deficiencies significantly hinder the practical efficiency of the scheme, and prevent it from scaling to large data settings. To address the problems, we first present FAST, which achieves forward privacy and the same communication efficiency as Bost's scheme, but uses only symmetric cryptographic primitives. We then present FASTIO, which retains all good properties of FAST, and further improves I/O efficiency. We implemented the two schemes and compared their performance with Bost's scheme. The experiment results show that both our schemes are highly efficient.

Data sharing through the cloud is flourishing with the development of cloud computing technology. The new wave of technology will also give rise to new security challenges, particularly the data confidentiality in cloud-based sharing applications. Searchable encryption is considered as one of the most promising solutions for balancing data confidentiality and usability. However, most existing searchable encryption schemes cannot simultaneously satisfy requirements for both high search efficiency and strong security due to lack of some must-have properties, such as parallel search and forward security. To address this problem, we propose a variant searchable encryption with parallelism and forward privacy, namely the parallel and forward private searchable public-key encryption (PFP-SPE). PFP-SPE scheme achieves both the parallelism and forward privacy at the expense of slightly higher storage costs. PFP-SPE has similar search efficiency with that of some searchable symmetric encryption schemes but no key distribution problem. The security analysis and the performance evaluation on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed scheme is suitable for practical application.

As the integration of the Internet of Vehicles and social networks, vehicular social networks (VSN) not only improves the efficiency and reliability of vehicular communication environment, but also provide more comprehensive social services for users. However, with the emergence of advanced communication and computing technologies, more and more data can be fast and conveniently collected from heterogeneous devices, and VSN has to meet new security challenges such as data security and privacy protection. Searchable encryption (SE) as a promising cryptographic primitive is devoted to data confidentiality without sacrificing data searchability. However, most existing schemes are vulnerable to the adaptive leakage-exploiting attacks or can not meet the efficiency requirements of practical applications, especially the searchable public-key encryption schemes (SPE). To achieve secure and efficient keyword search in VSN, we design a new blockchain-based searchable public-key encryption scheme with forward and backward privacy (BSPEFB). BSPEFB is a decentralized searchable public-key encryption scheme since the central search cloud server is replaced by the smart contract. Meanwhile, BSPEFB supports forward and backward privacy to achieve privacy protection. Finally, we implement a prototype of our basic construction and demonstrate the practicability of the proposed scheme in applications.

Searchable encryption (SE) supports privacy-preserving searches over encrypted data. Recent studies on SE have focused on improving efficiency of the schemes. However, it was shown that most of the previous SE schemes could reveal the client's queries even if they are encrypted, thereby leading to privacy violation. In order to solve the problem, several forward private SE schemes have been proposed in a single client environment. However, the previous forward private SE schemes have never been analyzed in multi-client settings. In this paper, we briefly review the previous forward private SE schemes. Then, we conduct a comparative analysis of them in terms of performance and forward privacy. Our analysis demonstrates the previous forward secure SE schemes highly depend on the file-counter. Lastly, we show that they are not scalable in multi-client settings due to the performance and security issue from the file-counter.

Using dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption, a user with limited storage resources can securely outsource a database to an untrusted server, in such a way that the database can still be searched and updated efficiently. For these schemes, it would be desirable that updates do not reveal any information a priori about the modifications they carry out, and that deleted results remain inaccessible to the server a posteriori. If the first property, called forward privacy, has been the main motivation of recent works, the second one, backward privacy, has been overlooked. In this paper, we study for the first time the notion of backward privacy for searchable encryption. After giving formal definitions for different flavors of backward privacy, we present several schemes achieving both forward and backward privacy, with various efficiency trade-offs. Our constructions crucially rely on primitives such as constrained pseudo-random functions and puncturable encryption schemes. Using these advanced cryptographic primitives allows for a fine-grained control of the power of the adversary, preventing her from evaluating functions on selected inputs, or decrypting specific ciphertexts. In turn, this high degree of control allows our SSE constructions to achieve the stronger forms of privacy outlined above. As an example, we present a framework to construct forward-private schemes from range-constrained pseudo-random functions. Finally, we provide experimental results for implementations of our schemes, and study their practical efficiency.

Searchable Symmetric Encryption aims at making possible searching over an encrypted database stored on an untrusted server while keeping privacy of both the queries and the data, by allowing some small controlled leakage to the server. Recent work shows that dynamic schemes – in which the data is efficiently updatable – leaking some information on updated keywords are subject to devastating adaptative attacks breaking the privacy of the queries. The only way to thwart this attack is to design forward private schemes whose update procedure does not leak if a newly inserted element matches previous search queries. This work proposes Sophos as a forward private SSE scheme with performance similar to existing less secure schemes, and that is conceptually simpler (and also more efficient) than previous forward private constructions. In particular, it only relies on trapdoor permutations and does not use an ORAM-like construction. We also explain why Sophos is an optimal point of the security/performance tradeoff for SSE. Finally, an implementation and evaluation results demonstrate its practical efficiency.