Private search over big data leveraging distributed file system and parallel processing

In this work, we identify the security and privacy problems associated with a certain Big Data application, namely secure keyword-based search over encrypted cloud data and emphasize the actual challenges and technical difficulties in the Big Data setting. More specifically, we provide definitions from which privacy requirements can be derived. In addition, we adapt an existing work on privacy-preserving keyword-based search method to the Big Data setting, in which, not only data is huge but also changing and accumulating very fast. Our proposal is scalable in the sense that it can leverage distributed file systems and parallel programming techniques such as the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and the MapReduce programming model, to work with very large data sets. We also propose a lazy idf-updating method that can efficiently handle the relevancy scores of the documents in a dynamically changing, large data set. We empirically show the efficiency and accuracy of the method through extensive set of experiments on real data

Privacy-Preserving Secret Shared Computations using MapReduce

Data outsourcing allows data owners to keep their data at \emph{untrusted} clouds that do not ensure the privacy of data and/or computations. One useful framework for fault-tolerant data processing in a distributed fashion is MapReduce, which was developed for \emph{trusted} private clouds. This paper presents algorithms for data outsourcing based on Shamir's secret-sharing scheme and for executing privacy-preserving SQL queries such as count, selection including range selection, projection, and join while using MapReduce as an underlying programming model. Our proposed algorithms prevent an adversary from knowing the database or the query while also preventing output-size and access-pattern attacks. Interestingly, our algorithms do not involve the database owner, which only creates and distributes secret-shares once, in answering any query, and hence, the database owner also cannot learn the query. Logically and experimentally, we evaluate the efficiency of the algorithms on the following parameters: (\textit{i}) the number of communication rounds (between a user and a server), (\textit{ii}) the total amount of bit flow (between a user and a server), and (\textit{iii}) the computational load at the user and the server.\BComment: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Accepted 01 Aug. 201

Analysis of outsourcing data to the cloud using autonomous key generation

Cloud computing, a technology that enables users to store and manage their data at a low cost and high availability, has been emerging for the past few decades because of the many services it provides. One of the many services cloud computing provides to its users is data storage. The majority of the users of this service are still concerned to outsource their data due to the integrity and confidentiality issues, as well as performance and cost issues, that come along with it. These issues make it necessary to encrypt data prior to outsourcing it to the cloud. However, encrypting data prior to outsourcing makes searching the data obsolete, lowering the functionality of the cloud. Most existing cloud storage schemes often prioritize security over performance and functionality, or vice versa. In this thesis, the cloud storage service is explored, and the aspects of security, performance, and functionality are analyzed in order to investigate the trade-offs of the service. DSB-SEIS, a scheme with encryption intensity selection, an autonomous key generation algorithm that allows users to control the encryption intensity of their files, as well as other features is developed in order to find a balance between performance, security, and functionality. The features that DSB-SEIS contains are deduplication, assured deletion, and searchable encryption. The effect of encryption intensity selection on encryption, decryption, and key generation is explored, and the performance and security of DSB-SEIS are evaluated. The MapReduce framework is also used to investigate the DSB-SEIS algorithm performance with big data. Analysis demonstrates that the encryption intensity selection algorithm generates a manageable number of encryption keys based on the confidentiality of data while not adding significant overhead on encryption or decryption --Abstract, page iii

Preserving privacy in edge computing

Edge computing or fog computing enables realtime services to smart application users by storing data and services at the edge of the networks. Edge devices in the edge computing handle data storage and service provisioning. Therefore, edge computing has become a  new norm for several delay-sensitive smart applications such as automated vehicles, ambient-assisted living, emergency response services, precision agriculture, and smart electricity grids. Despite having great potential, privacy threats are the main barriers to the success of edge computing. Attackers can leak private or sensitive information of data owners and modify service-related data for hampering service provisioning in edge computing-based smart applications. This research takes privacy issues of heterogeneous smart application data into account that are stored in edge data centers. From there, this study focuses on the development of privacy-preserving models for user-generated smart application data in edge computing and edge service-related data, such as Quality-of-Service (QoS) data, for ensuring unbiased service provisioning. We begin with developing privacy-preserving techniques for user data generated by smart applications using steganography that is one of the data hiding techniques. In steganography, user sensitive information is hidden within nonsensitive information of data before outsourcing smart application data, and stego data are produced for storing in the edge data center. A steganography approach must be reversible or lossless to be useful in privacy-preserving techniques. In this research, we focus on numerical (sensor data) and textual (DNA sequence and text) data steganography. Existing steganography approaches for numerical data are irreversible. Hence, we introduce a lossless or reversible numerical data steganography approach using Error Correcting Codes (ECC). Modern lossless steganography approaches for text data steganography are mainly application-specific and lacks imperceptibility, and DNA steganography requires reference DNA sequence for the reconstruction of the original DNA sequence. Therefore, we present the first blind and lossless DNA sequence steganography approach based on the nucleotide substitution method in this study. In addition, a text steganography method is proposed that using invisible character and compression based encoding for ensuring reversibility and higher imperceptibility.  Different experiments are conducted to demonstrate the justification of our proposed methods in these studies. The searching capability of the stored stego data is challenged in the edge data center without disclosing sensitive information. We present a privacy-preserving search framework for stego data on the edge data center that includes two methods. In the first method, we present a keyword-based privacy-preserving search method that allows a user to send a search query as a hash string. However, this method does not support the range query. Therefore, we develop a range search method on stego data using an order-preserving encryption (OPE) scheme. In both cases, the search service provider retrieves corresponding stego data without revealing any sensitive information. Several experiments are conducted for evaluating the performance of the framework. Finally, we present a privacy-preserving service computation framework using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) based cryptosystem for ensuring the service provider's privacy during service selection and composition. Our contributions are two folds. First, we introduce a privacy-preserving service selection model based on encrypted Quality-of-Service (QoS) values of edge services for ensuring privacy. QoS values are encrypted using FHE. A distributed computation model for service selection using MapReduce is designed for improving efficiency. Second, we develop a composition model for edge services based on the functional relationship among edge services for optimizing the service selection process. Various experiments are performed in both centralized and distributed computing environments to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework using a synthetic QoS dataset

A parallelized disjunctive query based searchable encryption scheme for big data

Searchable Encryption (SE) allows a client to search over large amounts of encrypted data outsourced to the Cloud. Although, this helps to maintain the confidentiality of the outsourced data but achieving privacy is a difficult and resource intensive task. With the increase in the query effectiveness, i.e., by shifting from single keyword SE to multi-keyword SE there is a notable drop in the efficiency. This motivates to make use of the advances in the multi-core architectures and multiple threads where the search can be delegated across different threads to perform search in a parallel fashion. The proposed scheme is based on probabilistic trapdoors that are formed by making use of the property of modular inverses. The use of probabilistic trapdoors helps resist distinguishability attacks. The rigorous security analysis helps us to appreciate the advantage of having a probabilistic trapdoor. Furthermore, to validate the performance of the proposed scheme, it is implemented and deployed onto the British Telecommunication's Public Cloud offering and tested over a real speech corpus. The implementation is also extended to anticipate the performance gain by using the multi-core architecture that helps to maintain the lightweight property of the scheme

Cloud data security and various cryptographic algorithms

Cloud computing has spread widely among different organizations due to its advantages, such as cost reduction, resource pooling, broad network access, and ease of administration. It increases the abilities of physical resources by optimizing shared use. Clients’ valuable items (data and applications) are moved outside of regulatory supervision in a shared environment where many clients are grouped together. However, this process poses security concerns, such as sensitive information theft and personally identifiable data leakage. Many researchers have contributed to reducing the problem of data security in cloud computing by developing a variety of technologies to secure cloud data, including encryption. In this study, a set of encryption algorithms (advance encryption standard (AES), data encryption standard (DES), Blowfish, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) encryption, and international data encryption algorithm (IDEA) was compared in terms of security, data encipherment capacity, memory usage, and encipherment time to determine the optimal algorithm for securing cloud information from hackers. Results show that RSA and IDEA are less secure than AES, Blowfish, and DES). The AES algorithm encrypts a huge amount of data, takes the least encipherment time, and is faster than other algorithms, and the Blowfish algorithm requires the least amount of memory space