Concurrent Expandable AMQs on the Basis of Quotient Filters

A quotient filter is a cache efficient Approximate Membership Query (AMQ) data structure. Depending on the fill degree of the filter most insertions and queries only need to access one or two consecutive cache lines. This makes quotient filters very fast compared to the more commonly used Bloom filters that incur multiple independent memory accesses depending on the false positive rate. However, concurrent Bloom filters are easy to implement and can be implemented lock-free while concurrent quotient filters are not as simple. Usually concurrent quotient filters work by using an external array of locks - each protecting a region of the table. Accessing this array incurs one additional memory access per operation. We propose a new locking scheme that has no memory overhead. Using this new locking scheme we achieve 1.6× times higher insertion performance and over 2.1× higher query performance than with the common external locking scheme. Another advantage of quotient filters over Bloom filters is that a quotient filter can change its capacity when it is becoming full. We implement this growing technique for our concurrent quotient filters and adapt it in a way that allows unbounded growing while keeping a bounded false positive rate. We call the resulting data structure a fully expandable quotient filter. Its design is similar to scalable Bloom filters, but we exploit some concepts inherent to quotient filters to improve the space efficiency and the query speed. Additionally, we propose several quotient filter variants that are aimed to reduce the number of status bits (2-status-bit variant) or to simplify concurrent implementations (linear probing quotient filter). The linear probing quotient filter even leads to a lock-free concurrent filter implementation. This is especially interesting, since we show that any lock-free implementation of other common quotient filter variants would incur significant overheads in the form of additional data fields or multiple passes over the accessed data. The code produced as part of this submission can be found at https://www.github.com/Toobiased/lpqfilter

In-packet Bloom filters: Design and networking applications

The Bloom filter (BF) is a well-known space-efficient data structure that answers set membership queries with some probability of false positives. In an attempt to solve many of the limitations of current inter-networking architectures, some recent proposals rely on including small BFs in packet headers for routing, security, accountability or other purposes that move application states into the packets themselves. In this paper, we consider the design of such in-packet Bloom filters (iBF). Our main contributions are exploring the design space and the evaluation of a series of extensions (1) to increase the practicality and performance of iBFs, (2) to enable false-negative-free element deletion, and (3) to provide security enhancements. In addition to the theoretical estimates, extensive simulations of the multiple design parameters and implementation alternatives validate the usefulness of the extensions, providing for enhanced and novel iBF networking applications.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, preprint submitted to Elsevier COMNET Journa

Privacy-Enhanced Searches Using Encrypted Bloom Filters

It is often necessary for two or more or more parties that do not fully trust each other to share data selectively. For example, one intelligence agency might be willing to turn over certain documents to another such agency, but only if the second agency requests the specific documents. The problem, of course, is finding out that such documents exist when access to the database is restricted. We propose a search scheme based on Bloom filters and group ciphers such as Pohlig-Hellman encryption. A semi-trusted third party can transform one party's search queries to a form suitable for querying the other party's database, in such a way that neither the third party nor the database owner can see the original query. Furthermore, the encryption keys used to construct the Bloom filters are not shared with this third party. Multiple providers and queries are supported; provision can be made for third-party "warrant servers", as well as "censorship sets" that limit the data to be shared

Secure Retrieval of Encrypted Similar Documents using Bloom Filters

The ability to search for similar documents is a well-known problem on the Web and Information Retrieval field. For example, identifying similar profiles across different government agencies is an important process during intelligence gathering. Nonetheless, when data belongs to multiple parties, internal security policies and government regulations cannot allow the participating parties to freely share their sensitive documents. In our project, we aim to address the following problem: Given a user’s query Q and an encrypted database of documents stored on a third-party cloud server, we want to retrieve top-k documents similar to Q without disclosing Q and the contents of the database to the cloud server. We translated documents into bloom filter representations and used the Jaccard Coefficient metric in order to find similarity between each document and Q. We will be conducting empirical tests to validate the reliability, speed, and space efficiency of using Bloom Filters in order to perform operations over Encrypted data. Our proposed solution allows users to keep the contents of documents hidden from unauthorized parties and at the same time facilitating end-users to efficiently retrieve top-k similar documents from the cloud in a secure manner. In our experiments, we found that using a bloom filter provided adequate security amongst the entities involved. The use of bloom filters to measure the Jaccard coefficient accuracy showed good results at a reasonable bit size

Design of a multiple bloom filter for distributed navigation routing

Unmanned navigation of vehicles and mobile robots can be greatly simplified by providing environmental intelligence with dispersed wireless sensors. The wireless sensors can work as active landmarks for vehicle localization and routing. However, wireless sensors are often resource scarce and require a resource-saving design. In this paper, a multiple Bloom-filter scheme is proposed to compress a global routing table for a wireless sensor. It is used as a lookup table for routing a vehicle to any destination but requires significantly less memory space and search effort. An error-expectation-based design for a multiple Bloom filter is proposed as an improvement to the conventional false-positive-rate-based design. The new design is shown to provide an equal relative error expectation for all branched paths, which ensures a better network load balance and uses less memory space. The scheme is implemented in a project for wheelchair navigation using wireless camera motes. © 2013 IEEE

Finger Vein Template Protection with Directional Bloom Filter

Biometrics has become a widely accepted solution for secure user authentication. However, the use of biometric traits raises serious concerns about the protection of personal data and privacy. Traditional biometric systems are vulnerable to attacks due to the storage of original biometric data in the system. Because biometric data cannot be changed once it has been compromised, the use of a biometric system is limited by the security of its template. To protect biometric templates, this paper proposes the use of directional bloom filters as a cancellable biometric approach to transform the biometric data into a non-invertible template for user authentication purposes. Recently, Bloom filter has been used for template protection due to its efficiency with small template size, alignment invariance, and irreversibility. Directional Bloom Filter improves on the original bloom filter. It generates hash vectors with directional subblocks rather than only a single-column subblock in the original bloom filter. Besides, we make use of multiple fingers to generate a biometric template, which is termed multi-instance biometrics. It helps to improve the performance of the method by providing more information through the use of multiple fingers. The proposed method is tested on three public datasets and achieves an equal error rate (EER) as low as 5.28% in the stolen or constant key scenario. Analysis shows that the proposed method meets the four properties of biometric template protection. Doi: 10.28991/HIJ-2023-04-02-013 Full Text: PD