Optimal and Efficient Searchable Encryption with Single Trapdoor for Multi-Owner Data Sharing in Federated Cloud Computing

Cloud computing, an Internet based computing model, has changed the way of data owners store and manage data. In such environment, data sharing is very important with more efficient data access control. Issuing an aggregate key to users on data enables and authorizes them to search for data of select encrypted files using trapdoor or encrypted keyword. The existing schemes defined for this purpose do have certain limitations. For instance, Cui et al. scheme is elegant but lacks in flexibility in access control in presence of multiple data owners sharing data to users. Its single trapdoor approach needs transformation into individual trapdoors to access data of specific data owner. Moreover, the existing schemes including that of Cui et al. does not support federated cloud.  In this paper we proposed an efficient key aggregate searchable encryption scheme which enables multiple featuressuch as support for truly single aggregate key to access data of many data owners, federated cloud support,query privacy, controlled search process and security against cross-pairing attack. It has algorithms for setup, keygen, encrypt, extract, aggregate, trapdoor, test and federator. In multi-user setting it is designed to serve data owners and users with secure data sharing through key aggregate searchable encryption The proposed scheme supports federated cloud. Experimental results revealed that the proposed scheme is provably secure withrelatively less computational overhead and time complexity when compared with the state of the art

On the security of NoSQL cloud database services

Processing a vast volume of data generated by web, mobile and Internet-enabled devices, necessitates a scalable and flexible data management system. Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is a new cloud computing paradigm, promising a cost-effective and scalable, fully-managed database functionality meeting the requirements of online data processing. Although DBaaS offers many benefits it also introduces new threats and vulnerabilities. While many traditional data processing threats remain, DBaaS introduces new challenges such as confidentiality violation and information leakage in the presence of privileged malicious insiders and adds new dimension to the data security. We address the problem of building a secure DBaaS for a public cloud infrastructure where, the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is not completely trusted by the data owner. We present a high level description of several architectures combining modern cryptographic primitives for achieving this goal. A novel searchable security scheme is proposed to leverage secure query processing in presence of a malicious cloud insider without disclosing sensitive information. A holistic database security scheme comprised of data confidentiality and information leakage prevention is proposed in this dissertation. The main contributions of our work are: (i) A searchable security scheme for non-relational databases of the cloud DBaaS; (ii) Leakage minimization in the untrusted cloud. The analysis of experiments that employ a set of established cryptographic techniques to protect databases and minimize information leakage, proves that the performance of the proposed solution is bounded by communication cost rather than by the cryptographic computational effort

Survey on securing data storage in the cloud

Cloud Computing has become a well-known primitive nowadays; many researchers and companies are embracing this fascinating technology with feverish haste. In the meantime, security and privacy challenges are brought forward while the number of cloud storage user increases expeditiously. In this work, we conduct an in-depth survey on recent research activities of cloud storage security in association with cloud computing. After an overview of the cloud storage system and its security problem, we focus on the key security requirement triad, i.e., data integrity, data confidentiality, and availability. For each of the three security objectives, we discuss the new unique challenges faced by the cloud storage services, summarize key issues discussed in the current literature, examine, and compare the existing and emerging approaches proposed to meet those new challenges, and point out possible extensions and futuristic research opportunities. The goal of our paper is to provide a state-of-the-art knowledge to new researchers who would like to join this exciting new field

Novel Proposed Work for Empirical Word Searching in Cloud Environment

People's lives have become much more convenient as a result of the development of cloud storage. The third-party server has received a lot of data from many people and businesses for storage. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that the user's data is protected from prying eyes. In the cloud environment, searchable encryption technology is used to protect user information when retrieving data. The versatility of the scheme is, however, constrained by the fact that the majority of them only offer single-keyword searches and do not permit file changes.A novel empirical multi-keyword search in the cloud environment technique is offered as a solution to these issues. Additionally, it prevents the involvement of a third party in the transaction between data holder and user and guarantees integrity. Our system achieves authenticity at the data storage stage by numbering the files, verifying that the user receives a complete ciphertext. Our technique outperforms previous analogous schemes in terms of security and performance and is resistant to inside keyword guessing attacks.The server cannot detect if the same set of keywords is being looked for by several queries because our system generates randomized search queries. Both the number of keywords in a search query and the number of keywords in an encrypted document can be hidden. Our searchable encryption method is effective and protected from the adaptive chosen keywords threat at the same time

AAQ-PEKS: An Attribute-based Anti-Quantum Public-Key Encryption Scheme with Keyword Search for E-healthcare Scenarios

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have been utilized in plentiful medical institutions due to their superior convenience and low storage overhead. Nevertheless, it is difficult for medical departments with disparate management regulations to share EMRs through secure communication channels since sensitive EMRs are prone to be tampered with. Therefore, the EMRs should be encrypted before being outsourced to the network servers. Public key Encryption with Keyword Search (PEKS) has the ability for doctors to search encrypted EMRs, but traditional PEKS algorithms are susceptible to quantum computing attacks and without considering access control. To address the aforementioned issues, we proposed AAQ-PEKS scheme, named an attribute-based anti-quantum public-key encryption scheme with keyword search. Initially, based on the LWE hardness, we first introduce the attribute-based PEKS that can resist quantum attacks in E-health scenarios. Secondly, we combine Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) into AAQ-PEKS to realize access control for sensitive EMRs. Thirdly, the computational security analysis illustrates that our scheme achieves correctness, Indistinguishability against Chosen Plaintext Attack (IND-CPA) and Indistinguishability against Chosen Keyword Attack (IND-CKA). Lastly, comprehensive performance evaluation in practice elaborates that our AAQ-PEKS is more efficient compared with other existing top-tier schemes. To conclude, our scheme has the characteristics of resisting quantum attacks and fine-grained access control for E-health scenarios

Optimizing Key Management within a Crypto-System using Aggregate Keys

Sharing data with peers is an important functionality in cloud storage. This is a study and analysis of secure, efficient, and flexible sharing of data with other users in cloud storage. The new public key encryptions which produce constant-size ciphertexts in such a way that effective delegation of decryption rights given to any set of ciphertexts are described in this paper. The novelty of the mechanism is that someone can aggregate any number of secret keys and turn them into a small single key, but combine the power of all the keys being grouped. To describe, in other words, the secret key holder could release a constant-size aggregate key for more flexible choices of ciphertext set in cloud storage, but different encrypted files outside of the set remain confidential. The aggregate compact key can be sent to others with ease or saved in a smart card with very less secure storage. In this paper, we discuss various such mechanisms and demonstrate the topic with a project. Some of the papers written by other authors in the area are analyzed in this paper. The project in this paper is a partial implementation of the proposed Crypto System

An efficient attribute-based multi-keyword search scheme in encrypted keyword generation

With the growing popularity of cloud computing in recent years, data owners (DOs) now prefer to outsource their data to cloud servers and allow the specific data users (DUs) to retrieve the data. Searchable encryption is an important tool to provide secure search over the encrypted cloud data without infringing data confidentiality and data privacy. In this work, we consider a secure search service providing fine-grained and search functionality, called attribute-based multiple keyword search (ABMKS), which can be seen as an extension of searchable encryption. In the existing ABMKS schemes, the computation operations in the encrypted keyword index generation are time-consuming modular exponentiation, and the number of which is linearly growing with the factor m . Here m is the number of keywords embedded in a file. To reduce the computation overhead, in this paper, we propose an ABMKS with only multiplication operations in encrypted keyword index generation. As a result, the computation cost of the encrypted keyword index generation is more efficient than the existing schemes. In addition, the encrypted keyword indexes are aggregated into one item, which is regardless of the number of underlying keywords in a file data. Finally, the security and the performance analysis demonstrate that our scheme is both efficient and secure

Secure Remote Storage of Logs with Search Capabilities

Dissertação de Mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaAlong side with the use of cloud-based services, infrastructure and storage, the use of application logs in business critical applications is a standard practice nowadays. Such application logs must be stored in an accessible manner in order to used whenever needed. The debugging of these applications is a common situation where such access is required. Frequently, part of the information contained in logs records is sensitive. This work proposes a new approach of storing critical logs in a cloud-based storage recurring to searchable encryption, inverted indexing and hash chaining techniques to achieve, in a unified way, the needed privacy, integrity and authenticity while maintaining server side searching capabilities by the logs owner. The designed search algorithm enables conjunctive keywords queries plus a fine-grained search supported by field searching and nested queries, which are essential in the referred use case. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed solution is also the first to introduce a query language that enables complex conjunctive keywords and a fine-grained search backed by field searching and sub queries.A gerac¸ ˜ao de logs em aplicac¸ ˜oes e a sua posterior consulta s˜ao fulcrais para o funcionamento de qualquer neg´ocio ou empresa. Estes logs podem ser usados para eventuais ac¸ ˜oes de auditoria, uma vez que estabelecem uma baseline das operac¸ ˜oes realizadas. Servem igualmente o prop´ osito de identificar erros, facilitar ac¸ ˜oes de debugging e diagnosticar bottlennecks de performance. Tipicamente, a maioria da informac¸ ˜ao contida nesses logs ´e considerada sens´ıvel. Quando estes logs s˜ao armazenados in-house, as considerac¸ ˜oes relacionadas com anonimizac¸ ˜ao, confidencialidade e integridade s˜ao geralmente descartadas. Contudo, com o advento das plataformas cloud e a transic¸ ˜ao quer das aplicac¸ ˜oes quer dos seus logs para estes ecossistemas, processos de logging remotos, seguros e confidenciais surgem como um novo desafio. Adicionalmente, regulac¸ ˜ao como a RGPD, imp˜oe que as instituic¸ ˜oes e empresas garantam o armazenamento seguro dos dados. A forma mais comum de garantir a confidencialidade consiste na utilizac¸ ˜ao de t ´ecnicas criptogr ´aficas para cifrar a totalidade dos dados anteriormente `a sua transfer ˆencia para o servidor remoto. Caso sejam necess´ arias capacidades de pesquisa, a abordagem mais simples ´e a transfer ˆencia de todos os dados cifrados para o lado do cliente, que proceder´a `a sua decifra e pesquisa sobre os dados decifrados. Embora esta abordagem garanta a confidencialidade e privacidade dos dados, rapidamente se torna impratic ´avel com o crescimento normal dos registos de log. Adicionalmente, esta abordagem n˜ao faz uso do potencial total que a cloud tem para oferecer. Com base nesta tem´ atica, esta tese prop˜oe o desenvolvimento de uma soluc¸ ˜ao de armazenamento de logs operacionais de forma confidencial, integra e autˆ entica, fazendo uso das capacidades de armazenamento e computac¸ ˜ao das plataformas cloud. Adicionalmente, a possibilidade de pesquisa sobre os dados ´e mantida. Essa pesquisa ´e realizada server-side diretamente sobre os dados cifrados e sem acesso em momento algum a dados n˜ao cifrados por parte do servidor..

Searchable Encryption for Cloud and Distributed Systems

The vast development in information and communication technologies has spawned many new computing and storage architectures in the last two decades. Famous for its powerful computation ability and massive storage capacity, cloud services, including storage and computing, replace personal computers and software systems in many industrial applications. Another famous and influential computing and storage architecture is the distributed system, which refers to an array of machines or components geographically dispersed but jointly contributes to a common task, bringing premium scalability, reliability, and efficiency. Recently, the distributed cloud concept has also been proposed to benefit both cloud and distributed computing. Despite the benefits of these new technologies, data security and privacy are among the main concerns that hinder the wide adoption of these attractive architectures since data and computation are not under the control of the end-users in such systems. The traditional security mechanisms, e.g., encryption, cannot fit these new architectures since they would disable the fast access and retrieval of remote storage servers. Thus, an urgent question turns to be how to enable refined and efficient data retrieval on encrypted data among numerous records (i.e., searchable encryption) in the cloud and distributed systems, which forms the topic of this thesis. Searchable encryption technologies can be divided into Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) and Public-key Encryption with Keyword Search (PEKS). The intrinsical symmetric key hinders data sharing since it is problematic and insecure to reveal one’s key to others. However, SSE outperforms PEKS due to its premium efficiency and is thus is prefered in a number of keyword search applications. Then multi-user SSE with rigorous and fine access control undoubtedly renders a satisfactory solution of both efficiency and security, which is the first problem worthy of our much attention. Second, functions and versatility play an essential role in a cloud storage application but it is still tricky to realize keyword search and deduplication in the cloud simultaneously. Large-scale data usually renders significant data redundancy and saving cloud storage resources turns to be inevitable. Existing schemes only facilitate data retrieval due to keywords but rarely consider other demands like deduplication. To be noted, trivially and hastily affiliating a separate deduplication scheme to the searchable encryption leads to disordered system architecture and security threats. Therefore, attention should be paid to versatile solutions supporting both keyword search and deduplication in the cloud. The third problem to be addressed is implementing multi-reader access for PEKS. As we know, PEKS was born to support multi-writers but enabling multi-readers in PEKS is challenging. Repeatedly encrypting the same keyword with different readers’ keys is not an elegant solution. In addition to keyword privacy, user anonymity coming with a multi-reader setting should also be formulated and preserved. Last but not least, existing schemes targeting centralized storage have not taken full advantage of distributed computation, which is considerable efficiency and fast response. Specifically, all testing tasks between searchable ciphertexts and trapdoor/token are fully undertaken by the only centralized cloud server, resulting in a busy system and slow response. With the help of distributed techniques, we may now look forward to a new turnaround, i.e., multiple servers jointly work to perform the testing with better efficiency and scalability. Then the intractable multi-writer/multi-reader mode supporting multi-keyword queries may also come true as a by-product. This thesis investigates searchable encryption technologies in cloud storage and distributed systems and spares effort to address the problems mentioned above. Our first work can be classified into SSE. We formulate the Multi-user Verifiable Searchable Symmetric Encryption (MVSSE) and propose a concrete scheme for multi-user access. It not only offers multi-user access and verifiability but also supports extension on updates as well as a non-single keyword index. Moreover, revocable access control is obtained that the search authority is validated each time a query is launched, different from existing mechanisms that once the search authority is granted, users can search forever. We give simulation-based proof, demonstrating our proposal possesses Universally Composable (UC)-security. Second, we come up with a redundancy elimination solution on top of searchable encryption. Following the keyword comparison approach of SSE, we formulate a hybrid primitive called Message-Locked Searchable Encryption (MLSE) derived in the way of SSE’s keyword search supporting keyword search and deduplication and present a concrete construction that enables multi-keyword query and negative keyword query as well as deduplication at a considerable small cost, i.e., the tokens are used for both search and deduplication. And it can further support Proof of Storage (PoS), testifying the content integrity in cloud storage. The semantic security is proved in Random Oracle Model using the game-based methodology. Third, as the branch of PEKS, the Broadcast Authenticated Encryption with Keyword Search (BAEKS) is proposed to bridge the gap of multi-reader access for PEKS, followed by a scheme. It not only resists Keyword Guessing Attacks (KGA) but also fills in the blank of anonymity. The scheme is proved secure under Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption in the Random Oracle Model. For distributed systems, we present a Searchable Encryption based on Efficient Privacy-preserving Outsourced calculation framework with Multiple keys (SE-EPOM) enjoying desirable features, which can be classified into PEKS. Instead of merely deploying a single server, multiple servers are employed to execute the test algorithm in our scheme jointly. The refined search, i.e., multi-keyword query, data confidentiality, and search pattern hiding, are realized. Besides, the multi-writer/multi-reader mode comes true. It is shown that under the distributed circumstance, much efficiency can be substantially achieved by our construction. With simulation-based proof, the security of our scheme is elaborated. All constructions proposed in this thesis are formally proven according to their corresponding security definitions and requirements. In addition, for each cryptographic primitive designed in this thesis, concrete schemes are initiated to demonstrate the availability and practicality of our proposal

AI-enabled privacy-preservation phrase with multi-keyword ranked searching for sustainable edge-cloud networks in the era of industrial IoT

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