Secret Sharing for Cloud Data Security

Cloud computing helps reduce costs, increase business agility and deploy solutions with a high return on investment for many types of applications. However, data security is of premium importance to many users and often restrains their adoption of cloud technologies. Various approaches, i.e., data encryption, anonymization, replication and verification, help enforce different facets of data security. Secret sharing is a particularly interesting cryptographic technique. Its most advanced variants indeed simultaneously enforce data privacy, availability and integrity, while allowing computation on encrypted data. The aim of this paper is thus to wholly survey secret sharing schemes with respect to data security, data access and costs in the pay-as-you-go paradigm

Finding Safety in Numbers with Secure Allegation Escrows

For fear of retribution, the victim of a crime may be willing to report it only if other victims of the same perpetrator also step forward. Common examples include 1) identifying oneself as the victim of sexual harassment, especially by a person in a position of authority or 2) accusing an influential politician, an authoritarian government, or ones own employer of corruption. To handle such situations, legal literature has proposed the concept of an allegation escrow: a neutral third-party that collects allegations anonymously, matches them against each other, and de-anonymizes allegers only after de-anonymity thresholds (in terms of number of co-allegers), pre-specified by the allegers, are reached. An allegation escrow can be realized as a single trusted third party; however, this party must be trusted to keep the identity of the alleger and content of the allegation private. To address this problem, this paper introduces Secure Allegation Escrows (SAE, pronounced "say"). A SAE is a group of parties with independent interests and motives, acting jointly as an escrow for collecting allegations from individuals, matching the allegations, and de-anonymizing the allegations when designated thresholds are reached. By design, SAEs provide a very strong property: No less than a majority of parties constituting a SAE can de-anonymize or disclose the content of an allegation without a sufficient number of matching allegations (even in collusion with any number of other allegers). Once a sufficient number of matching allegations exist, the join escrow discloses the allegation with the allegers' identities. We describe how SAEs can be constructed using a novel authentication protocol and a novel allegation matching and bucketing algorithm, provide formal proofs of the security of our constructions, and evaluate a prototype implementation, demonstrating feasibility in practice.Comment: To appear in NDSS 2020. New version includes improvements to writing and proof. The protocol is unchange

Ideal Tightly Couple (t,m,n) Secret Sharing

As a fundamental cryptographic tool, (t,n)-threshold secret sharing ((t,n)-SS) divides a secret among n shareholders and requires at least t, (t<=n), of them to reconstruct the secret. Ideal (t,n)-SSs are most desirable in security and efficiency among basic (t,n)-SSs. However, an adversary, even without any valid share, may mount Illegal Participant (IP) attack or t/2-Private Channel Cracking (t/2-PCC) attack to obtain the secret in most (t,n)-SSs.To secure ideal (t,n)-SSs against the 2 attacks, 1) the paper introduces the notion of Ideal Tightly cOupled (t,m,n) Secret Sharing (or (t,m,n)-ITOSS ) to thwart IP attack without Verifiable SS; (t,m,n)-ITOSS binds all m, (m>=t), participants into a tightly coupled group and requires all participants to be legal shareholders before recovering the secret. 2) As an example, the paper presents a polynomial-based (t,m,n)-ITOSS scheme, in which the proposed k-round Random Number Selection (RNS) guarantees that adversaries have to crack at least symmetrical private channels among participants before obtaining the secret. Therefore, k-round RNS enhances the robustness of (t,m,n)-ITOSS against t/2-PCC attack to the utmost. 3) The paper finally presents a generalized method of converting an ideal (t,n)-SS into a (t,m,n)-ITOSS, which helps an ideal (t,n)-SS substantially improve the robustness against the above 2 attacks