Spiral: Fast, High-Rate Single-Server PIR via FHE Composition

We introduce the Spiral family of single-server private information retrieval (PIR) protocols. Spiral relies on a composition of two lattice-based homomorphic encryption schemes: the Regev encryption scheme and the Gentry-Sahai-Waters encryption scheme. We introduce new ciphertext translation techniques to convert between these two schemes and in doing so, enable new trade-offs in communication and computation. Across a broad range of database configurations, the basic version of Spiral simultaneously achieves at least a 4.5x reduction in query size, 1.5x reduction in response size, and 2x increase in server throughput compared to previous systems. A variant of our scheme, SpiralStreamPack, is optimized for the streaming setting and achieves a server throughput of 1.9 GB/s for databases with over a million records (compared to 200 MB/s for previous protocols) and a rate of 0.81 (compared to 0.24 for previous protocols). For streaming large records (e.g., a private video stream), we estimate the monetary cost of SpiralStreamPack to be only 1.9x greater than that of the no-privacy baseline where the client directly downloads the desired record

Somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme for secure range query process in a cloud environment

With the development of the cloud computing, recently, many service models have appeared which are based on the cloud computing, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), and database as a service (DaaS). For DaaS, there exist many security issues. Especially, the database as a service cannot be fully secured because of some security problems. This research area of cloud computing is called as cloud security. One of the problems is that it is difficult to execute queries on encrypted data in cloud database without any information leakage. This thesis proposes a secure range query process which is based on a somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme to improve secure database functionalities. There is no sensitive information leakage in the secure range query process. The data that are stored in the cloud database are the integers which are encrypted with their binary forms by bits. A homomorphic “greater-than” algorithm is used in the process to compare two integers. Efficiency, security, and the maximum noise that can be controlled in the process are covered in the security and efficiency analysis. Parameter setting analysis of the process will also be discussed. Results of the proposed method have been analyzed through some experiments to test the secure range query process for its practicability with some relatively practical parameter settings.Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Computational Science

Server-Aided Privacy-Preserving Proximity Testing

Proximity testing is at the core of many Location-Based online Services (LBS) which we use in our daily lives to order taxis, find places of interest nearby, connect with people. Currently, most such services expect a user to submit his location to them and trust the LBS not to abuse this information, and use it only to provide the service. Existing cases of such information being misused (e.g., by the LBS employees or criminals who breached its security) motivates the search for better solutions that would ensure the privacy of user data, and give users control of how their data is being used.In this thesis, we address this problem using cryptographic techniques. We propose three cryptographic protocols that allow two users to perform proximity testing (check if they are close enough to each other) with the help of two servers.In the papers 1 and 2, the servers are introduced in order to allow users not to be online at the same time: one user may submit their location to the servers and go offline, the other user coming online later and finishing proximity testing. The drastically improves the practicality of such protocols, since the mobile devices that users usually run may not always be online. We stress that the servers in these protocols merely aid the users in performing the proximity testing, and none of the servers can independently extract the user data.In the paper 3, we use the servers to offload the users\u27 computation and communication to. The servers here pre-generate correlated random data and send it to users, who can use it to perform a secure proximity testing protocol faster. Paper 3, together with the paper 2, are highly practical: they provide strong security guarantees and are suitable to be executed on resource-constrained mobile devices. In fact, the work of clients in these protocols is close to negligible as most of the work is done by servers

Post-Quantum Era Privacy Protection for Intelligent Infrastructures

As we move into a new decade, the global world of Intelligent Infrastructure (II) services integrated into the Internet of Things (IoT) are at the forefront of technological advancements. With billions of connected devices spanning continents through interconnected networks, security and privacy protection techniques for the emerging II services become a paramount concern. In this paper, an up-to-date privacy method mapping and relevant use cases are surveyed for II services. Particularly, we emphasize on post-quantum cryptography techniques that may (or must when quantum computers become a reality) be used in the future through concrete products, pilots, and projects. The topics presented in this paper are of utmost importance as (1) several recent regulations such as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have given privacy a significant place in digital society, and (2) the increase of IoT/II applications and digital services with growing data collection capabilities are introducing new threats and risks on citizens' privacy. This in-depth survey begins with an overview of security and privacy threats in IoT/IIs. Next, we summarize some selected Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) suitable for privacy-concerned II services, and then map recent PET schemes based on post-quantum cryptographic primitives which are capable of withstanding quantum computing attacks. This paper also overviews how PETs can be deployed in practical use cases in the scope of IoT/IIs, and maps some current projects, pilots, and products that deal with PETs. A practical case study on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is presented to demonstrate how PETs can be applied in reality. Finally, we discuss the main challenges with respect to current PETs and highlight some future directions for developing their post-quantum counterparts

SECURITY-AWARE DATA MANAGEMENT AND PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION STRATEGIES FOR CLOUD STORAGE SYSTEMS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Secure and Efficient Comparisons between Untrusted Parties

A vast number of online services is based on users contributing their personal information. Examples are manifold, including social networks, electronic commerce, sharing websites, lodging platforms, and genealogy. In all cases user privacy depends on a collective trust upon all involved intermediaries, like service providers, operators, administrators or even help desk staff. A single adversarial party in the whole chain of trust voids user privacy. Even more, the number of intermediaries is ever growing. Thus, user privacy must be preserved at every time and stage, independent of the intrinsic goals any involved party. Furthermore, next to these new services, traditional offline analytic systems are replaced by online services run in large data centers. Centralized processing of electronic medical records, genomic data or other health-related information is anticipated due to advances in medical research, better analytic results based on large amounts of medical information and lowered costs. In these scenarios privacy is of utmost concern due to the large amount of personal information contained within the centralized data. We focus on the challenge of privacy-preserving processing on genomic data, specifically comparing genomic sequences. The problem that arises is how to efficiently compare private sequences of two parties while preserving confidentiality of the compared data. It follows that the privacy of the data owner must be preserved, which means that as little information as possible must be leaked to any party participating in the comparison. Leakage can happen at several points during a comparison. The secured inputs for the comparing party might leak some information about the original input, or the output might leak information about the inputs. In the latter case, results of several comparisons can be combined to infer information about the confidential input of the party under observation. Genomic sequences serve as a use-case, but the proposed solutions are more general and can be applied to the generic field of privacy-preserving comparison of sequences. The solution should be efficient such that performing a comparison yields runtimes linear in the length of the input sequences and thus producing acceptable costs for a typical use-case. To tackle the problem of efficient, privacy-preserving sequence comparisons, we propose a framework consisting of three main parts. a) The basic protocol presents an efficient sequence comparison algorithm, which transforms a sequence into a set representation, allowing to approximate distance measures over input sequences using distance measures over sets. The sets are then represented by an efficient data structure - the Bloom filter -, which allows evaluation of certain set operations without storing the actual elements of the possibly large set. This representation yields low distortion for comparing similar sequences. Operations upon the set representation are carried out using efficient, partially homomorphic cryptographic systems for data confidentiality of the inputs. The output can be adjusted to either return the actual approximated distance or the result of an in-range check of the approximated distance. b) Building upon this efficient basic protocol we introduce the first mechanism to reduce the success of inference attacks by detecting and rejecting similar queries in a privacy-preserving way. This is achieved by generating generalized commitments for inputs. This generalization is done by treating inputs as messages received from a noise channel, upon which error-correction from coding theory is applied. This way similar inputs are defined as inputs having a hamming distance of their generalized inputs below a certain predefined threshold. We present a protocol to perform a zero-knowledge proof to assess if the generalized input is indeed a generalization of the actual input. Furthermore, we generalize a very efficient inference attack on privacy-preserving sequence comparison protocols and use it to evaluate our inference-control mechanism. c) The third part of the framework lightens the computational load of the client taking part in the comparison protocol by presenting a compression mechanism for partially homomorphic cryptographic schemes. It reduces the transmission and storage overhead induced by the semantically secure homomorphic encryption schemes, as well as encryption latency. The compression is achieved by constructing an asymmetric stream cipher such that the generated ciphertext can be converted into a ciphertext of an associated homomorphic encryption scheme without revealing any information about the plaintext. This is the first compression scheme available for partially homomorphic encryption schemes. Compression of ciphertexts of fully homomorphic encryption schemes are several orders of magnitude slower at the conversion from the transmission ciphertext to the homomorphically encrypted ciphertext. Indeed our compression scheme achieves optimal conversion performance. It further allows to generate keystreams offline and thus supports offloading to trusted devices. This way transmission-, storage- and power-efficiency is improved. We give security proofs for all relevant parts of the proposed protocols and algorithms to evaluate their security. A performance evaluation of the core components demonstrates the practicability of our proposed solutions including a theoretical analysis and practical experiments to show the accuracy as well as efficiency of approximations and probabilistic algorithms. Several variations and configurations to detect similar inputs are studied during an in-depth discussion of the inference-control mechanism. A human mitochondrial genome database is used for the practical evaluation to compare genomic sequences and detect similar inputs as described by the use-case. In summary we show that it is indeed possible to construct an efficient and privacy-preserving (genomic) sequences comparison, while being able to control the amount of information that leaves the comparison. To the best of our knowledge we also contribute to the field by proposing the first efficient privacy-preserving inference detection and control mechanism, as well as the first ciphertext compression system for partially homomorphic cryptographic systems

Analyzing the Privacy and Societal Challenges Stemming from the Rise of Personal Genomic Testing

Progress in genomics is enabling researchers to better understand the role of the genome in our health and well-being, stimulating hope for more effective and cost efficient healthcare. At the same time, the rapid cost drop of genome sequencing has enabled the emergence of a booming market for direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing. Nowadays, companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA provide affordable health, genealogy, and ancestry reports, and have already tested tens of millions of customers. How- ever, while this technology has the potential to transform society by improving people’s lives, it also harbors dangers as it prompts important privacy and societal concerns. In this thesis, we shed light on these issues using a mixed-methods approach. We start by conducting a technical investigation of the limitations on privacy-enhancing technologies used for testing, storing, and sharing genomic data. We rely on a structured methodology to contextualize and provide a critical analysis of the current state-of-the-art and we identify and discuss ten open problems faced by the community. We then focus on the societal aspects of DTC genetic testing by conducting two large-scale analyses of the genetic testing discourse focusing on both mainstream and fringe social networks, specifically, Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. Our analyses show that DTC genetic testing is a popular topic of discussion on all platforms. However, these discussions often include highly toxic language expressed through hateful and racist comments and openly antisemitic rhetoric, often conveyed through memes. Overall, our findings highlight that the rise in popularity of this new technology is accompanied by several societal implications that are unlikely to be addressed by only one research field and rather require a multi-disciplinary approach

Privacy-preserving data analytics in cloud computing

The evolution of digital content and rapid expansion of data sources has raised the need for streamlined monitoring, collection, storage and analysis of massive, heterogeneous data to extract useful knowledge and support decision-making mechanisms. In this context, cloud computing o↵ers extensive, cost-e↵ective and on demand computing resources that improve the quality of services for users and also help service providers (enterprises, governments and individuals). Service providers can avoid the expense of acquiring and maintaining IT resources while migrating data and remotely managing processes including aggregation, monitoring and analysis in cloud servers. However, privacy and security concerns of cloud computing services, especially in storing sensitive data (e.g. personal, healthcare and financial) are major challenges to the adoption of these services. To overcome such barriers, several privacy-preserving techniques have been developed to protect outsourced data in the cloud. Cryptography is a well-known mechanism that can ensure data confidentiality in the cloud. Traditional cryptography techniques have the ability to protect the data through encryption in cloud servers and data owners can retrieve and decrypt data for their processing purposes. However, in this case, cloud users can use the cloud resources for data storage but they cannot take full advantage of cloud-based processing services. This raises the need to develop advanced cryptosystems that can protect data privacy, both while in storage and in processing in the cloud. Homomorphic Encryption (HE) has gained attention recently because it can preserve the privacy of data while it is stored and processed in the cloud servers and data owners can retrieve and decrypt their processed data to their own secure side. Therefore, HE o↵ers an end-to-end security mechanism that is a preferable feature in cloud-based applications. In this thesis, we developed innovative privacy-preserving cloud-based models based on HE cryptosystems. This allowed us to build secure and advanced analytic models in various fields. We began by designing and implementing a secure analytic cloud-based model based on a lightweight HE cryptosystem. We used a private resident cloud entity, called ”privacy manager”, as an intermediate communication server between data owners and public cloud servers. The privacy manager handles analytical tasks that cannot be accomplished by the lightweight HE cryptosystem. This model is convenient for several application domains that require real-time responses. Data owners delegate their processing tasks to the privacy manager, which then helps to automate analysis tasks without the need to interact with data owners. We then developed a comprehensive, secure analytical model based on a Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), that has more computational capability than the lightweight HE. Although FHE can automate analysis tasks and avoid the use of the privacy manager entity, it also leads to massive computational overhead. To overcome this issue, we took the advantage of the massive cloud resources by designing a MapReduce model that massively parallelises HE analytical tasks. Our parallelisation approach significantly speeds up the performance of analysis computations based on FHE. We then considered distributed analytic models where the data is generated from distributed heterogeneous sources such as healthcare and industrial sensors that are attached to people or installed in a distributed-based manner. We developed a secure distributed analytic model by re-designing several analytic algorithms (centroid-based and distribution-based clustering) to adapt them into a secure distributed-based models based on FHE. Our distributed analytic model was developed not only for distributed-based applications, but also it eliminates FHE overhead obstacle by achieving high efficiency in FHE computations. Furthermore, the distributed approach is scalable across three factors: analysis accuracy, execution time and the amount of resources used. This scalability feature enables users to consider the requirements of their analysis tasks based on these factors (e.g. users may have limited resources or time constrains to accomplish their analysis tasks). Finally, we designed and implemented two privacy-preserving real-time cloud-based applications to demonstrate the capabilities of HE cryptosystems, in terms of both efficiency and computational capabilities for applications that require timely and reliable delivery of services. First, we developed a secure cloud-based billing model for a sensor-enabled smart grid infrastructure by using lightweight HE. This model handled billing analysis tasks for individual users in a secure manner without the need to interact with any trusted parties. Second, we built a real-time secure health surveillance model for smarter health communities in the cloud. We developed a secure change detection model based on an exponential smoothing technique to predict future changes in health vital signs based on FHE. Moreover, we built an innovative technique to parallelise FHE computations which significantly reduces computational overhead

An Approach to Guide Users Towards Less Revealing Internet Browsers

When browsing the Internet, HTTP headers enable both clients and servers send extra data in their requests or responses such as the User-Agent string. This string contains information related to the sender’s device, browser, and operating system. Previous research has shown that there are numerous privacy and security risks result from exposing sensitive information in the User-Agent string. For example, it enables device and browser fingerprinting and user tracking and identification. Our large analysis of thousands of User-Agent strings shows that browsers differ tremendously in the amount of information they include in their User-Agent strings. As such, our work aims at guiding users towards using less exposing browsers. In doing so, we propose to assign an exposure score to browsers based on the information they expose and vulnerability records. Thus, our contribution in this work is as follows: first, provide a full implementation that is ready to be deployed and used by users. Second, conduct a user study to identify the effectiveness and limitations of our proposed approach. Our implementation is based on using more than 52 thousand unique browsers. Our performance and validation analysis show that our solution is accurate and efficient. The source code and data set are publicly available and the solution has been deployed

FrodoPIR: Simple, Scalable, Single-Server Private Information Retrieval

We design $\mathsf{FrodoPIR}$ — a highly configurable, stateful, single-server Private Information Retrieval (PIR) scheme that involves an offline phase that is completely client-independent. Coupled with small online overheads, it leads to much smaller amortized financial costs on the server-side than previous approaches. In terms of performance for a database of $1$ million $1$KB elements, $\mathsf{FrodoPIR}$ requires $< 1$ second for responding to a client query, has a server response size blow-up factor of $< 3.6\times$, and financial costs are $\sim \$1$ for answering $100,000$ client queries. Our experimental analysis is built upon a simple, non-optimized Rust implementation, illustrating that $\mathsf{FrodoPIR}$ is particularly suitable for deployments that involve large numbers of clients