Visible to the public Quantifying Information Leakage of Deterministic Encryption

TitleQuantifying Information Leakage of Deterministic Encryption
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2019
AuthorsJurado, Mireya, Smith, Geoffrey
Conference NameProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Cloud Computing Security Workshop
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Conference LocationLondon, United Kingdom
ISBN Number978-1-4503-6826-1
Keywordscompositionality, Deterministic Encryption, encryption audits, leakage, Metrics, pubcrawl, quantitative information flow, resilience, Resiliency
AbstractIn order to protect user data while maintaining application functionality, encrypted databases can use specialized cryptography such as property-revealing encryption, which allows a property of the underlying plaintext values to be computed from the ciphertext. One example is deterministic encryption which ensures that the same plaintext encrypted under the same key will produce the same ciphertext. This technology enables clients to make queries on sensitive data hosted in a cloud server and has considerable potential to protect data. However, the security implications of deterministic encryption are not well understood. We provide a leakage analysis of deterministic encryption through the application of the framework of quantitative information flow. A key insight from this framework is that there is no single "right'' measure by which leakage can be quantified: information flow depends on the operational scenario and different operational scenarios require different leakage measures. We evaluate leakage under three operational scenarios, modeled using three different gain functions, under a variety of prior distributions in order to bring clarity to this problem.
DOI10.1145/3338466.3358915
Citation Keyjurado_quantifying_2019