SoK: Cryptographically Protected Database Search

Abstract

Abstract-Protected database search systems cryptographically isolate the roles of reading from, writing to, and administering the database. This separation limits unnecessary administrator access and protects data in the case of system breaches. Since protected search was introduced in 2000, the area has grown rapidly; systems are offered by academia, start-ups, and established companies.However, there is no best protected search system or set of techniques. Design of such systems is a balancing act between security, functionality, performance, and usability. This challenge is made more difficult by ongoing database specialization, as some users will want the functionality of SQL, NoSQL, or NewSQL databases. This database evolution will continue, and the protected search community should be able to quickly provide functionality consistent with newly invented databases.At the same time, the community must accurately and clearly characterize the tradeoffs between different approaches. To address these challenges, we provide the following contributions:1) An identification of the important primitive operations across database paradigms. We find there are a small number of base operations that can be used and combined to support a large number of database paradigms. 2) An evaluation of the current state of protected search systems in implementing these base operations. This evaluation describes the main approaches and tradeoffs for each base operation. Furthermore, it puts protected search in the context of unprotected search, identifying key gaps in functionality. 3) An analysis of attacks against protected search for different base queries. 4) A roadmap and tools for transforming a protected search system into a protected database, including an open-source performance evaluation platform and initial user opinions of protected search. Index Terms-searchable symmetric encryption, property preserving encryption, database search, oblivious random access memory, private information retrieval

SoK: A Systematic Study of Attacks in Efficient Encrypted Cloud Data Search

“…The MSDB leakage-based attack targets on specific ORE schemes with specific leaky information, i.e., orders of underlying plaintexts and the first different bit of [44] Notes: The meaning of each bubble type is given below. Part of the summary listed here has been done in [15] and the superscripts around the corresponding indicators represent the attack number for each prior work paper that presents several attacks. Required leakage Auxiliary knowledge Runtime Keyword universe tested -structure -contents of full dataset -more than quadratic -more than 1000 -equality -contents of a subset of dataset -quadratic -less than 500 -all the search tokens -linear -distributional knowledge of dataset -a subset of search tokens -distributional knowledge of queries -keyword universe plaintexts.…”

“…In the literature there are some review papers [15,19,37] related to the security of efficient searchable encryption. However, they have different focuses from us.…”

PrivHome: Privacy-Preserving Authenticated Communication in Smart Home Environment

“…These includes the Boolean search scheme [41], the scheme with improved locality [42] and a leakage suppression scheme [43]. Comprehensive surveys on searchable encryption can be found in [44], [45], [46].…”

Privacy-Preserving Whole-Genome Variant Queries

“…Recently the survey [13] categorized the entire field of encrypted or protected search, which offers several additional alternatives to our work. We can imagine a combination of the presented techniques with our ideas as possible future work.…”