Malicious Entities are in Vain: Preserving Privacy in Publish and Subscribe Systems

Abstract

Publish and subscribe (pub/sub) system is a decoupled communication paradigm that allows routing of publications. Through a set of dedicated third party servers, referred to as brokers, publications are disseminated without establishing any link between publishers and subscribers. However, the involvement of these brokers raises security and privacy issues as they can harvest sensitive data about subscribers. Furthermore, a malicious broker may collude with malicious subscribers and/or publishers to infer subscribers' interests. Our solution is such that subscribers' interests are not revealed to curious brokers and published data can only be accessed by the authorised subscribers. Moreover, the proposed protocol is secure against the collusion attacks between malicious brokers, publishers, and subscribers.

Collusion Defender: Preserving Subscribers’ Privacy in Publish and Subscribe Systems

“…Third, thanks to the use of multiple brokers, the proposed solution is secure against collusion attacks between brokers and subscribers/publishers. Herein, we stress that the idea of using multiple types of brokers to defend against collusion attacks in pub/sub systems has been proposed in our previous work [1]. This work extends our idea by giving a detailed architecture, a comprehensive security analysis, and a thorough performance evaluation.…”

“…Then, the broker identifies the intended subscribers and forwards the publications to them. *This work is an extension of initial work appeared in the proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications (Trustcom) 2018 under the title "Malicious Entities are in Vain: Preserving Privacy in Publish and Subscribe Systems" by Shujie Cui, Sana Belguith, Pramodya De Alwis, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, and Giovanni Russello [1].…”

“…permutations for those whose match results are 0. In other words, B I and B T brokers could successfully guess the permutations for 1 bits and 0 bits with 1 x! and 1 (m−x)!…”

“…Specifically, in the subscription phase, the Sub encrypts all the interests and permutes them, thus the computation complexity of the subscription operation is m(HASH + P RF ) + P RP , where m is the number of interests in the subscription. Moreover, the communication overhead of this phase is 3|SN | + mκ + |η| + κ + |@| + |T | bits 1 , where κ is the bit length of the encrypted interests. When issuing a publication, the Pub encrypts the tags and payload with F and KP-ABE, respectively.…”

Accountable privacy preserving attribute based framework for authenticated encrypted access in clouds

“…That is, ensuring the secrecy of outsourced data is considered as a major challenge for cloud clients, due to the loss of data control [1], [2], [3]. Thus, several solutions have proposed to apply data encryption at the data owner side, such that the decrypting keys are preserved out of reach of the cloud provider [4], [5]. Although data encryption ensures the confidentiality of data against malicious entities, the use of traditional encryption mechanisms i.e., symmetric and asymmetric encryption is not sufficient to support fine-grained access control to outsourced data.…”