868 research outputs found
Deterministic, Stash-Free Write-Only ORAM
Write-Only Oblivious RAM (WoORAM) protocols provide privacy by encrypting the
contents of data and also hiding the pattern of write operations over that
data. WoORAMs provide better privacy than plain encryption and better
performance than more general ORAM schemes (which hide both writing and reading
access patterns), and the write-oblivious setting has been applied to important
applications of cloud storage synchronization and encrypted hidden volumes. In
this paper, we introduce an entirely new technique for Write-Only ORAM, called
DetWoORAM. Unlike previous solutions, DetWoORAM uses a deterministic,
sequential writing pattern without the need for any "stashing" of blocks in
local state when writes fail. Our protocol, while conceptually simple, provides
substantial improvement over prior solutions, both asymptotically and
experimentally. In particular, under typical settings the DetWoORAM writes only
2 blocks (sequentially) to backend memory for each block written to the device,
which is optimal. We have implemented our solution using the BUSE (block device
in user-space) module and tested DetWoORAM against both an encryption only
baseline of dm-crypt and prior, randomized WoORAM solutions, measuring only a
3x-14x slowdown compared to an encryption-only baseline and around 6x-19x
speedup compared to prior work
Ensuring data confidentiality via plausibly deniable encryption and secure deletion – a survey
Ensuring confidentiality of sensitive data is of paramount importance, since data leakage may not only endanger dataowners’ privacy, but also ruin reputation of businesses as well as violate various regulations like HIPPA andSarbanes-Oxley Act. To provide confidentiality guarantee, the data should be protected when they are preserved inthe personal computing devices (i.e.,confidentiality duringtheirlifetime); and also, they should be rendered irrecoverableafter they are removed from the devices (i.e.,confidentiality after their lifetime). Encryption and secure deletion are usedto ensure data confidentiality during and after their lifetime, respectively.This work aims to perform a thorough literature review on the techniques being used to protect confidentiality of thedata in personal computing devices, including both encryption and secure deletion. Especially for encryption, wemainly focus on the novel plausibly deniable encryption (PDE), which can ensure data confidentiality against both acoercive (i.e., the attacker can coerce the data owner for the decryption key) and a non-coercive attacker
ObliviSync: Practical Oblivious File Backup and Synchronization
Oblivious RAM (ORAM) protocols are powerful techniques that hide a client's
data as well as access patterns from untrusted service providers. We present an
oblivious cloud storage system, ObliviSync, that specifically targets one of
the most widely-used personal cloud storage paradigms: synchronization and
backup services, popular examples of which are Dropbox, iCloud Drive, and
Google Drive. This setting provides a unique opportunity because the above
privacy properties can be achieved with a simpler form of ORAM called
write-only ORAM, which allows for dramatically increased efficiency compared to
related work. Our solution is asymptotically optimal and practically efficient,
with a small constant overhead of approximately 4x compared with non-private
file storage, depending only on the total data size and parameters chosen
according to the usage rate, and not on the number or size of individual files.
Our construction also offers protection against timing-channel attacks, which
has not been previously considered in ORAM protocols. We built and evaluated a
full implementation of ObliviSync that supports multiple simultaneous read-only
clients and a single concurrent read/write client whose edits automatically and
seamlessly propagate to the readers. We show that our system functions under
high work loads, with realistic file size distributions, and with small
additional latency (as compared to a baseline encrypted file system) when
paired with Dropbox as the synchronization service.Comment: 15 pages. Accepted to NDSS 201
SoK: Plausibly Deniable Storage
Data privacy is critical in instilling trust and empowering the societal pacts of modern technology-driven democracies. Unfortunately, it is under continuous attack by overreaching or outright oppressive governments, including some of the world\u27s oldest democracies. Increasingly-intrusive anti-encryption laws severely limit the ability of standard encryption to protect privacy. New defense mechanisms are needed.
Plausible deniability (PD) is a powerful property, enabling users to hide the existence of sensitive information in a system under direct inspection by adversaries. Popular encrypted storage systems such as TrueCrypt and other research efforts have attempted to also provide plausible deniability. Unfortunately, these efforts have often operated under less well-defined assumptions and adversarial models. Careful analyses often uncover not only high overheads but also outright security compromise. Further, our understanding of adversaries, the underlying storage technologies, as well as the available plausible deniable solutions have evolved dramatically in the past two decades. The main goal of this work is to systematize this knowledge. It aims to:
- identify key PD properties, requirements, and approaches;
- present a direly-needed unified framework for evaluating security and performance;
- explore the challenges arising from the critical interplay between PD and modern system layered stacks;
- propose a new trace-oriented PD paradigm, able to decouple security guarantees from the underlying systems and thus ensure a higher level of flexibility and security independent of the technology stack.
This work is meant also as a trusted guide for system and security practitioners around the major challenges in understanding, designing, and implementing plausible deniability into new or existing systems
Oblivious Dynamic Searchable Encryption via Distributed PIR and ORAM
Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) allows to delegate search/update operations over encrypted data via an encrypted index. However, DSSE is known to be vulnerable against statistical inference attacks, which exploits information leakages from access patterns on encrypted index and files. Although generic Oblivious Random Access Machine (ORAM) can hide access patterns, it has been shown to be extremely costly to be directly used in DSSE setting.
We developed a series of Oblivious Distributed DSSE schemes that we refer to as \ODSE, which achieve oblivious access on the encrypted index with a high security and improved efficiency over the use of generic ORAM. Specifically, \ODSE schemes are 3-57 faster than applying the state-of-the-art generic ORAMs on encrypted dictionary index in real network settings. One of the proposed \ODSE schemes offers desirable security guarantees such as information-theoretic security with robustness against malicious servers. These properties are achieved by exploiting some of the unique characteristics of searchable encryption and encrypted index, which permits us to harness the computation and communication efficiency of multi-server PIR and Write-Only ORAM simultaneously. We fully implemented \ODSE and conducted extensive experiments to assess the performance of our proposed schemes in a real cloud environment
Shufflecake: Plausible Deniability for Multiple Hidden Filesystems on Linux
We present Shufflecake, a new plausible deniability design to hide the
existence of encrypted data on a storage medium making it very difficult for an
adversary to prove the existence of such data. Shufflecake can be considered a
``spiritual successor'' of tools such as TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt, but vastly
improved: it works natively on Linux, it supports any filesystem of choice, and
can manage multiple volumes per device, so to make deniability of the existence
of hidden partitions really plausible.
Compared to ORAM-based solutions, Shufflecake is extremely fast and simpler
but does not offer native protection against multi-snapshot adversaries.
However, we discuss security extensions that are made possible by its
architecture, and we show evidence why these extensions might be enough to
thwart more powerful adversaries.
We implemented Shufflecake as an in-kernel tool for Linux, adding useful
features, and we benchmarked its performance showing only a minor slowdown
compared to a base encrypted system. We believe Shufflecake represents a useful
tool for people whose freedom of expression is threatened by repressive
authorities or dangerous criminal organizations, in particular: whistleblowers,
investigative journalists, and activists for human rights in oppressive
regimes.Comment: A 15-page abstract of this work appears (with the same title) in the
proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
(CCS) 2023. This is the authors' full version. This revision date:
2023-12-07. This document supersedes any previous version
Titanium: A Metadata-Hiding File-Sharing System with Malicious Security
End-to-end encrypted file-sharing systems enable users to share files without revealing the file contents to the storage servers. However, the servers still learn metadata, including user identities and access patterns. Prior work tried to remove such leakage but relied on strong assumptions. Metal (NDSS \u2720) is not secure against malicious servers. MCORAM (ASIACRYPT \u2720) provides confidentiality against malicious servers, but not integrity.
Titanium is a metadata-hiding file-sharing system that offers confidentiality and integrity against malicious users and servers. Compared with MCORAM, which offers confidentiality against malicious servers, Titanium also offers integrity. Experiments show that Titanium is 5x-200x faster or more than MCORAM
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