Biblio

Verifiable Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (VDSSE) enables users to securely outsource databases (document sets) to cloud servers and perform searches and updates. The verifiability property prevents users from accepting incorrect search results returned by a malicious server. However, we discover that the community currently only focuses on preventing malicious behavior from the server but ignores incorrect updates from the client, which are very likely to happen since there is no record on the client to check. Indeed most existing VDSSE schemes are not sufficient to tolerate incorrect updates from the client. For instance, deleting a nonexistent keyword-identifier pair can break their correctness and soundness. In this paper, we demonstrate the vulnerabilities of a type of existing VDSSE schemes that fail them to ensure correctness and soundness properties on incorrect updates. We propose an efficient fault-tolerant solution that can consider any DSSE scheme as a black-box and make them into a fault-tolerant VDSSE in the malicious model. Forward privacy is an important property of DSSE that prevents the server from linking an update operation to previous search queries. Our approach can also make any forward secure DSSE scheme into a fault-tolerant VDSSE without breaking the forward security guarantee. In this work, we take FAST [1] (TDSC 2020), a forward secure DSSE, as an example, implement a prototype of our solution, and evaluate its performance. Even when compared with the previous fastest forward private construction that does not support fault tolerance, the experiments show that our construction saves 9× client storage and has better search and update efficiency.

An essential ingredient of the smart grid is software-based services. Increasingly, software is used to support control strategies and services that are critical to the grid's operation. Therefore, its correct operation is essential. For various reasons, software and its configuration needs to be updated. This update process represents a significant overhead for smart grid operators and failures can result in financial losses and grid instabilities. In this paper, we present a framework for determining the root causes of software rollout failures in the smart grid. It uses distributed sensors that indicate potential issues, such as anomalous grid states and cyber-attacks, and a causal inference engine based on a formalism called evidential networks. The aim of the framework is to support an adaptive approach to software rollouts, ensuring that a campaign completes in a timely and secure manner. The framework is evaluated for a software rollout use-case in a low voltage distribution grid. Experimental results indicate it can successfully discriminate between different root causes of failure, supporting an adaptive rollout strategy.