Efficient Oblivious Evaluation Protocol and Conditional Disclosure of Secrets for DFA

In oblivious finite automata evaluation, one party holds a private automaton, and the other party holds a private string of characters. The objective is to let the parties know whether the string is accepted by the automaton or not, while keeping their inputs secret. The applications include DNA searching, pattern matching, and more. Most of the previous works are based on asymmetric cryptographic primitives, such as homomorphic encryption and oblivious transfer. These primitives are significantly slower than symmetric ones. Moreover, some protocols also require several rounds of interaction. As our main contribution, we propose an oblivious finite automata evaluation protocol via conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS), using one (potentially malicious) outsourcing server. This results in a constant-round protocol, and no heavy asymmetric-key primitives are needed. Our protocol is based on a building block called an oblivious CDS scheme for deterministic finite automata\u27\u27 which we also propose in this paper. In addition, we propose a standard CDS scheme for deterministic finite automata as an independent interest

Systematizing Genome Privacy Research: A Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Perspective

Rapid advances in human genomics are enabling researchers to gain a better understanding of the role of the genome in our health and well-being, stimulating hope for more effective and cost efficient healthcare. However, this also prompts a number of security and privacy concerns stemming from the distinctive characteristics of genomic data. To address them, a new research community has emerged and produced a large number of publications and initiatives. In this paper, we rely on a structured methodology to contextualize and provide a critical analysis of the current knowledge on privacy-enhancing technologies used for testing, storing, and sharing genomic data, using a representative sample of the work published in the past decade. We identify and discuss limitations, technical challenges, and issues faced by the community, focusing in particular on those that are inherently tied to the nature of the problem and are harder for the community alone to address. Finally, we report on the importance and difficulty of the identified challenges based on an online survey of genome data privacy expertsComment: To appear in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs), Vol. 2019, Issue

Refereed Computation Delegation of Private Sequence Comparison in Cloud Computing

Abstract Sequence comparison has been widely used in many engineering systems, such as fuzzy keyword search, plagiarism detection, and comparison of gene sequences. However, when the length of the string is extraordinarily long, like the DNA sequence that contains millions of nucleotides, sequence comparison becomes an intractable work, especially when the DNA database is big and the computation resources are limited. Although the generic computation delegation schemes provide a theoretically feasible solution to this problem, it suffers from severe inefficiency when we directly substitute the general function by the sequence comparison function. In this paper, we focus on refereed computation delegation of sequence comparison and present the refereed computation delegation scheme of sequence comparison using multiple servers. In our scheme, the user can detect the dishonest servers and get the correct answer as long as there is one honest server. The direct application of our scheme is DNA sequence comparison of big gene database in medical system. Meanwhile, our scheme satisfies the security requirement of sequence privacy against the malicious adversaries. Moreover, since neither the fully homomorphic encryption nor the complicated proof systems are used for the problem generation and result verification, our solution clearly outperforms the existing schemes in terms of efficiency. The computation complexity of the user is reduced from O(mn) to O(log 2 (mn)), where m,n are the length of the sequences

Towards an Information Theoretic Analysis of Searchable Encryption (Extended Version)

Searchable encryption is a technique that allows a client to store data in encrypted form on a curious server, such that data can be retrieved while leaking a minimal amount of information to the server. Many searchable encryption schemes have been proposed and proved secure in their own computational model. In this paper we propose a generic model for the analysis of searchable encryptions. We then identify the security parameters of searchable encryption schemes and prove information theoretical bounds on the security of the parameters. We argue that perfectly secure searchable encryption schemes cannot be efficient. We classify the seminal schemes in two categories: the schemes that leak information upfront during the storage phase, and schemes that leak some information at every search. This helps designers to choose the right scheme for an application