Secure Outsourced Computation on Encrypted Data

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is a promising cryptographic technique that supports computations on encrypted data without requiring decryption first. This ability allows sensitive data, such as genomic, financial, or location data, to be outsourced for evaluation in a resourceful third-party such as the cloud without compromising data privacy. Basic homomorphic primitives support addition and multiplication on ciphertexts. These primitives can be utilized to represent essential computations, such as logic gates, which subsequently can support more complex functions. We propose the construction of efficient cryptographic protocols as building blocks (e.g., equality, comparison, and counting) that are commonly used in data analytics and machine learning. We explore the use of these building blocks in two privacy-preserving applications. One application leverages our secure prefix matching algorithm, which builds on top of the equality operation, to process geospatial queries on encrypted locations. The other applies our secure comparison protocol to perform conditional branching in private evaluation of decision trees. There are many outsourced computations that require joint evaluation on private data owned by multiple parties. For example, Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) is becoming feasible because of the recent advances of genome sequencing technology. Due to the sensitivity of genomic data, this data is encrypted using different keys possessed by different data owners. Computing on ciphertexts encrypted with multiple keys is a non-trivial task. Current solutions often require a joint key setup before any computation such as in threshold HE or incur large ciphertext size (at best, grows linearly in the number of involved keys) such as in multi-key HE. We propose a hybrid approach that combines the advantages of threshold and multi-key HE to support computations on ciphertexts encrypted with different keys while vastly reducing ciphertext size. Moreover, we propose the SparkFHE framework to support large-scale secure data analytics in the Cloud. SparkFHE integrates Apache Spark with Fully HE to support secure distributed data analytics and machine learning and make two novel contributions: (1) enabling Spark to perform efficient computation on large datasets while preserving user privacy, and (2) accelerating intensive homomorphic computation through parallelization of tasks across clusters of computing nodes. To our best knowledge, SparkFHE is the first addressing these two needs simultaneously

k-Nearest Neighbor Classification over Semantically Secure Encrypted Relational Data

Data Mining has wide applications in many areas such as banking, medicine, scientific research and among government agencies. Classification is one of the commonly used tasks in data mining applications. For the past decade, due to the rise of various privacy issues, many theoretical and practical solutions to the classification problem have been proposed under different security models. However, with the recent popularity of cloud computing, users now have the opportunity to outsource their data, in encrypted form, as well as the data mining tasks to the cloud. Since the data on the cloud is in encrypted form, existing privacy preserving classification techniques are not applicable. In this paper, we focus on solving the classification problem over encrypted data. In particular, we propose a secure k-NN classifier over encrypted data in the cloud. The proposed k-NN protocol protects the confidentiality of the data, user's input query, and data access patterns. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to develop a secure k-NN classifier over encrypted data under the semi-honest model. Also, we empirically analyze the efficiency of our solution through various experiments.Comment: 29 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1307.482

OS2: Oblivious similarity based searching for encrypted data outsourced to an untrusted domain

© 2017 Pervez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Public cloud storage services are becoming prevalent and myriad data sharing, archiving and collaborative services have emerged which harness the pay-as-you-go business model of public cloud. To ensure privacy and confidentiality often encrypted data is outsourced to such services, which further complicates the process of accessing relevant data by using search queries. Search over encrypted data schemes solve this problem by exploiting cryptographic primitives and secure indexing to identify outsourced data that satisfy the search criteria. Almost all of these schemes rely on exact matching between the encrypted data and search criteria. A few schemes which extend the notion of exact matching to similarity based search, lack realism as those schemes rely on trusted third parties or due to increase storage and computational complexity. In this paper we propose Oblivious Similarity based Search (OS2) for encrypted data. It enables authorized users to model their own encrypted search queries which are resilient to typographical errors. Unlike conventional methodologies, OS2 ranks the search results by using similarity measure offering a better search experience than exact matching. It utilizes encrypted bloom filter and probabilistic homomorphic encryption to enable authorized users to access relevant data without revealing results of search query evaluation process to the untrusted cloud service provider. Encrypted bloom filter based search enables OS2 to reduce search space to potentially relevant encrypted data avoiding unnecessary computation on public cloud. The efficacy of OS2 is evaluated on Google App Engine for various bloom filter lengths on different cloud configurations