30 results sorted by ID
Possible spell-corrected query: Bloom filter
On the Insecurity of Bloom Filter-Based Private Set Intersections
Jelle Vos, Jorrit van Assen, Tjitske Koster, Evangelia Anna Markatou, Zekeriya Erkin
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Private set intersections are cryptographic protocols that compute the intersection of multiple parties' private sets without revealing elements that are not in the intersection. These protocols become less efficient when the number of parties grows, or the size of the sets increases. For this reason, many protocols are based on Bloom filters, which speed up the protocol by approximating the intersections, introducing false positives with a small but non-negligible probability. These false...
Probabilistic Data Structures in the Wild: A Security Analysis of Redis
Mia Filić, Jonas Hofmann, Sam A. Markelon, Kenneth G. Paterson, Anupama Unnikrishnan
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Redis (Remote Dictionary Server) is a general purpose, in-memory database that supports a rich array of functionality, including various Probabilistic Data Structures (PDS), such as Bloom filters, Cuckoo filters, as well as cardinality and frequency estimators.
These PDS typically perform well in the average case. However, given that Redis is intended to be used across a diverse array of applications, it is crucial to evaluate how these PDS perform under worst-case scenarios, i.e., when...
HElix: Genome Similarity Detection in the Encrypted Domain
Rostin Shokri, Charles Gouert, Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos
Applications
As the field of genomics continues to expand and more sequencing data is gathered, genome analysis becomes increasingly relevant for many users. For example, a common scenario entails users trying to determine if their DNA samples are similar to DNA sequences hosted in a larger remote repository. Nevertheless, end users may be reluctant to upload their DNA sequences, while the owners of remote genomics repositories are unwilling to openly share their database. To address this challenge, we...
Result Pattern Hiding Boolean Searchable Encryption: Achieving Negligible False Positive Rates in Low Storage Overhead
Dandan Yuan, Shujie Cui, Giovanni Russello
Cryptographic protocols
Boolean Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) enables secure outsourcing of databases to an untrusted server in encrypted form and allows the client to execute secure Boolean queries involving multiple keywords. The leakage of keyword pair result pattern (KPRP) in a Boolean search poses a significant threat, which reveals the intersection of documents containing any two keywords involved in a search and can be exploited by attackers to recover plaintext information about searched keywords...
Adversary Resilient Learned Bloom Filters
Allison Bishop, Hayder Tirmazi
Secret-key cryptography
Creating an adversary resilient construction of the Learned Bloom Filter with provable guarantees is an open problem. We define a strong adversarial model for the Learned Bloom Filter. Our adversarial model extends an existing adversarial model designed for the Classical (i.e not ``Learned'') Bloom Filter by prior work and considers computationally bounded adversaries that run in probabilistic polynomial time (PPT). Using our model, we construct an adversary resilient variant of the Learned...
Mutator Sets and their Application to Scalable Privacy
Alan Szepieniec, Thorkil Værge
Cryptographic protocols
A mutator set is a cryptographic data structure for authenticating operations on a changing set of data elements called items. Informally:
- There is a short commitment to the set.
- There are succinct membership proofs for elements of the set.
- It is possible to update the commitment as well as the membership proofs with minimal effort as new items are added to the set or as existing items are removed from it.
- Items cannot be removed before they were added.
- It is...
Unconditionally Secure Multiparty Computation for Symmetric Functions with Low Bottleneck Complexity
Reo Eriguchi
Cryptographic protocols
Bottleneck complexity is an efficiency measure of secure multiparty computation (MPC) introduced by Boyle et al. (ICALP 2018) to achieve load-balancing. Roughly speaking, it is defined as the maximum communication complexity required by any player within the protocol execution. Since it was shown to be impossible to achieve sublinear bottleneck complexity in the number of players $n$ for all functions, a prior work constructed MPC protocols with low bottleneck complexity for specific...
Enabling Two-Party Secure Computation on Set Intersection
Ferhat Karakoç, Alptekin Küpçü
Cryptographic protocols
In this paper, we propose the first linear two-party secure-computation private set intersection (PSI) protocol, in the semi-honest adversary model, computing the following functionality. One of the parties ($P_X$) inputs a set of items $X = \{x_j \mid 1 \le j \le n_X\}$, whereas the other party ($P_Y$) inputs a set of items $Y = \{y_i \mid 1\le i \le n_Y \}$ and a set of corresponding data pairs $D_Y = \{ (d_i^0,d_i^1) \mid 1 \le i \le n_Y\}$ having the same cardinality with $Y$. While...
Bet-or-Pass: Adversarially Robust Bloom Filters
Moni Naor, Noa Oved
Foundations
A Bloom filter is a data structure that maintains a succinct and probabilistic representation of a set $S\subseteq U$ of elements from a universe $U$. It supports approximate membership queries. The price of the succinctness is allowing some error, namely false positives: for any $x\notin S$, it might answer `Yes' but with a small (non-negligible) probability.
When dealing with such data structures in adversarial settings, we need to define the correctness guarantee and formalize the...
Adversarial Correctness and Privacy for Probabilistic Data Structures
Mia Filić, Kenneth G. Paterson, Anupama Unnikrishnan, Fernando Virdia
Applications
We study the security of Probabilistic Data Structures (PDS) for
handling Approximate Membership Queries (AMQ); prominent
examples of AMQ-PDS are Bloom and Cuckoo filters. AMQ-PDS
are increasingly being deployed in environments where adversaries
can gain benefit from carefully selecting inputs, for example to
increase the false positive rate of an AMQ-PDS. They are also being
used in settings where the inputs are sensitive and should remain
private in the face of adversaries who can...
PSImple: Practical Multiparty Maliciously-Secure Private Set Intersection
Aner Ben Efraim, Olga Nissenbaum, Eran Omri, Anat Paskin-Cherniavsky
Cryptographic protocols
Private set intersection (PSI) protocols allow a set of mutually distrustful parties, each holding a private set of items,
to compute the intersection over all their sets, such that no other information is revealed.
PSI has a wide variety of applications including online advertising (e.g., efficacy computation), security (e.g., botnet detection, intrusion detection), proximity testing (e.g., COVID-19 contact tracing), and more. Private set intersection is a rapidly developing area and there...
Linear Complexity Private Set Intersection for Secure Two-Party Protocols
Ferhat Karakoç, Alptekin Küpçü
Cryptographic protocols
In this paper, we propose a new private set intersection (PSI) protocol with bi-oblivious data transfer that computes the following functionality. One of the parties $P_1$ inputs a set of items $X$ and a set of data pairs $D_1 = \{ (d_0^j,d_1^j)\}$ and the other party $P_2$ inputs a set of items $Y$. While $P_1$ outputs nothing, $P_2$ outputs a set of data $D_2 = \{ d_{b_j}^j \mid b_j \in \{0,1\}\}$ dependent on the intersection of $X$ and $Y$. This functionality is generally required when...
PSI from PaXoS: Fast, Malicious Private Set Intersection
Benny Pinkas, Mike Rosulek, Ni Trieu, Avishay Yanai
Cryptographic protocols
We present a 2-party private set intersection (PSI) protocol which provides security against malicious participants, yet is almost as fast as the fastest known semi-honest PSI protocol of Kolesnikov et al. (CCS 2016).
Our protocol is based on a new approach for two-party PSI, which can be instantiated to provide security against either malicious or semi-honest adversaries. The protocol is unique in that the only difference between the semi-honest and malicious versions is an instantiation...
Probabilistic Data Structures in Adversarial Environments
David Clayton, Christopher Patton, Thomas Shrimpton
Applications
Probabilistic data structures use space-efficient representations of data in order to (approximately) respond to queries about the data. Traditionally, these structures are accompanied by probabilistic bounds on query-response errors. These bounds implicitly assume benign attack models, in which the data and the queries are chosen non-adaptively, and independent of the randomness used to construct the representation. Yet probabilistic data structures are increasingly used in settings where...
Private Set Relations with Bloom Filters for Outsourced SLA Validation
Louis Tajan, Dirk Westhoff, Frederik Armknecht
Cryptographic protocols
In the area of cloud computing, judging the fulfillment of service-level agreements on a technical level is gaining more and more importance. To support this we introduce privacy preserving set relations as inclusiveness and disjointness based on Bloom filters. We propose to compose them in a slightly different way by applying a keyed hash function. Besides discussing the correctness of the set relations, we analyze how this impacts the privacy of the sets content as well as providing...
On Deploying Secure Computing: Private Intersection-Sum-with-Cardinality
Mihaela Ion, Ben Kreuter, Ahmet Erhan Nergiz, Sarvar Patel, Mariana Raykova, Shobhit Saxena, Karn Seth, David Shanahan, Moti Yung
Cryptographic protocols
In this work, we discuss our successful efforts for industry deployment of a cryptographic secure computation protocol. The problem we consider is privately computing aggregate conversion rate of advertising campaigns. This underlying functionality can be abstracted as Private Intersection-Sum (PI-Sum) with Cardinality. In this setting two parties hold datasets containing user identifiers, and one of the parties additionally has an integer value associated with each of its user identifiers....
Secure and Scalable Multi-User Searchable Encryption
Cédric Van Rompay, Refik Molva, Melek Önen
Public-key cryptography
By allowing a large number of users to behave as readers or writers, Multi-User Searchable Encryption (MUSE) raises new security and performance challenges beyond the typical requirements of Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE).
In this paper we identify two core mandatory requirements of MUSE protocols being privacy in face of users colluding with the CSP and low complexity for the users, pointing that no existing MUSE protocol satisfies these two requirements at the same time.
We then...
2017/448
Last updated: 2018-02-28
Obfuscation of Bloom Filter Queries from Ring-LWE
Alex Davidson
Foundations
We devise a virtual black-box (VBB) obfuscator for querying whether set elements are stored within Bloom filters, with security based on the Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) problem and strongly universal hash functions. Our construction uses an abstracted encoding scheme that we instantiate using the Gentry, Gorbunov and Halevi (GGH15) multilinear map, with an explicit security reduction to RLWE. This represents an improvement on the functionality and security guarantees compared with the...
Improved Private Set Intersection against Malicious Adversaries
Peter Rindal, Mike Rosulek
Cryptographic protocols
Private set intersection (PSI) refers to a special case of secure two-party computation in which the parties each have a set of items and compute the intersection of these sets without revealing any additional information. In this paper we present improvements to practical PSI providing security in the presence of {\em malicious} adversaries.
Our starting point is the protocol of Dong, Chen \& Wen (CCS 2013) that is based on Bloom filters. We identify a bug in their malicious-secure variant...
Breaking and Fixing Private Set Intersection Protocols
Mikkel Lambæk
Cryptographic protocols
A private set intersection protocol consists of two parties, a Sender and a Receiver, each with a secret input set. The protocol aims to have the Receiver output an intersection of the two sets while keeping the elements in the sets secret. This thesis thoroughly analyzes four recently published set intersection protocols, where it explains each protocol and checks whether it satisfies its corresponding security definition. The first two protocols [PSZ14, PSSZ15a] use random oblivious...
AnNotify: A Private Notification Service
Ania Piotrowska, Jamie Hayes, Nethanel Gelernter, George Danezis, Amir Herzberg
AnNotify is a scalable service for private, timely and low-cost online notifications, based on anonymous communication, sharding, dummy queries, and Bloom filters. We present the design and analysis of AnNotify, as well as an evaluation of its costs. We outline the design of AnNotify and calculate the concrete advantage of an adversary observing multiple queries. We present a number of extensions, such as generic presence and broadcast notifications, and applications, including notifications...
An Efficient Toolkit for Computing Private Set Operations
Alex Davidson, Carlos Cid
Private set operation (PSO) protocols provide a natural way of securely performing operations on data sets, such that crucial details of the input sets are not revealed. Such protocols have an ever-increasing number of practical applications, particularly when implementing privacy-preserving data mining schemes. Protocols for computing private set operations have been prevalent in multi-party computation literature over the past decade, and in the case of private set intersection (PSI), have...
Bloom Filters in Adversarial Environments
Moni Naor, Eylon Yogev
Foundations
Many efficient data structures use randomness, allowing them to improve upon deterministic ones. Usually, their efficiency and correctness are analyzed using probabilistic tools under the assumption that the inputs and queries are independent of the internal randomness of the data structure. In this work, we consider data structures in a more robust model, which we call the adversarial model. Roughly speaking, this model allows an adversary to choose inputs and queries adaptively according...
Accountable Storage
Giuseppe Ateniese, Michael T. Goodrich, Vassilios Lekakis, Charalampos Papamanthou, Evripidis Paraskevas, Roberto Tamassia
Cryptographic protocols
We introduce Accountable Storage, a framework allowing a client with small local space to outsource n file blocks to an untrusted server and be able (at any point in time after outsourcing) to provably compute how many bits have been discarded by the server.
Such protocols offer ``provable storage insurance" to a client: In case of a data loss, the client can be compensated with a dollar amount proportional to the damage that has occurred, forcing the server to be more ``accountable" for his...
On the Privacy Provisions of Bloom Filters in Lightweight Bitcoin Clients
Arthur Gervais, Ghassan O. Karame, Damian Gruber, Srdjan Capkun
Applications
Lightweight Bitcoin clients are gaining increasing adoption among Bitcoin users, owing to their reduced resource and bandwidth consumption. These clients support a simplified payment verification (SPV) mode as they are only required to download and verify a part of the block chain — thus supporting the usage of Bitcoin on constrained devices, such as smartphones. SPV clients rely on Bloom filters to receive transactions that are relevant to their local wallet. These filters embed all the...
Spatial Bloom Filters: Enabling Privacy in Location-aware Applications
Paolo Palmieri, Luca Calderoni, Dario Maio
Foundations
The wide availability of inexpensive positioning systems made it possible to embed them into smartphones and other personal devices. This marked the beginning of location-aware applications, where users request personalized services based on their geographic position. The location of a user is, however, highly sensitive information: the user's privacy can be preserved if only the minimum amount of information needed to provide the service is disclosed at any time. While some applications,...
Do I know you? -- Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Common Friend-Finder Protocols and Applications
Marcin Nagy, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Alexandra Dmitrienko, N. Asokan, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
Applications
The increasing penetration of Online Social Networks (OSNs) prompts the need for effectively accessing and utilizing social networking information. In numerous applications, users need to make trust and/or access control decisions involving other (possibly stranger) users, and one important factor is often the existence of common social relationships. This motivates the need for secure and privacy-preserving techniques allowing users to assess whether or not they have mutual friends.
This...
PSP: Private and Secure Payment with RFID
Erik-Oliver Blass, Anil Kurmus, Refik Molva, Thorsten Strufe
Cryptographic protocols
RFID can be used for a variety of applications, e.g., to conveniently pay for public transportation. However, achieving security and privacy of payment is challenging due to the extreme resource restrictions of RFID tags. In this paper, we propose PSP -- a secure, RFID-based protocol for privacy-preserving payment. Similar to traditional electronic cash, the user of a tag can pay access to a metro using his tag and so called {coins} of a virtual currency. With PSP, tags do not need to store...
Privacy-Enhanced Searches Using Encrypted Bloom Filters
Steven M. Bellovin, William R. Cheswick
Applications
It is often necessary for two or more or more parties
that do not fully trust each other
to selectively share data.
We propose a search scheme based on Bloom filters and Pohlig-Hellman
encryption. A semi-trusted third party can transform
one party's search queries to a form suitable for querying the
other party's database, in such a way that neither the third party
nor the database owner can see the original query. Furthermore,
the encryption keys used to construct the Bloom filters are...
Secure Indexes
Eu-Jin Goh
A secure index is a data structure that allows a querier with a ``trapdoor'' for a word x to test in O(1) time only if the index contains x; The index reveals no information about its contents without valid trapdoors, and trapdoors can only be generated with a secret key. Secure indexes are a natural extension of the problem of constructing data structures with privacy guarantees such as those provided by oblivious and history independent data structures. In this paper, we formally define a...
Private set intersections are cryptographic protocols that compute the intersection of multiple parties' private sets without revealing elements that are not in the intersection. These protocols become less efficient when the number of parties grows, or the size of the sets increases. For this reason, many protocols are based on Bloom filters, which speed up the protocol by approximating the intersections, introducing false positives with a small but non-negligible probability. These false...
Redis (Remote Dictionary Server) is a general purpose, in-memory database that supports a rich array of functionality, including various Probabilistic Data Structures (PDS), such as Bloom filters, Cuckoo filters, as well as cardinality and frequency estimators. These PDS typically perform well in the average case. However, given that Redis is intended to be used across a diverse array of applications, it is crucial to evaluate how these PDS perform under worst-case scenarios, i.e., when...
As the field of genomics continues to expand and more sequencing data is gathered, genome analysis becomes increasingly relevant for many users. For example, a common scenario entails users trying to determine if their DNA samples are similar to DNA sequences hosted in a larger remote repository. Nevertheless, end users may be reluctant to upload their DNA sequences, while the owners of remote genomics repositories are unwilling to openly share their database. To address this challenge, we...
Boolean Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) enables secure outsourcing of databases to an untrusted server in encrypted form and allows the client to execute secure Boolean queries involving multiple keywords. The leakage of keyword pair result pattern (KPRP) in a Boolean search poses a significant threat, which reveals the intersection of documents containing any two keywords involved in a search and can be exploited by attackers to recover plaintext information about searched keywords...
Creating an adversary resilient construction of the Learned Bloom Filter with provable guarantees is an open problem. We define a strong adversarial model for the Learned Bloom Filter. Our adversarial model extends an existing adversarial model designed for the Classical (i.e not ``Learned'') Bloom Filter by prior work and considers computationally bounded adversaries that run in probabilistic polynomial time (PPT). Using our model, we construct an adversary resilient variant of the Learned...
A mutator set is a cryptographic data structure for authenticating operations on a changing set of data elements called items. Informally: - There is a short commitment to the set. - There are succinct membership proofs for elements of the set. - It is possible to update the commitment as well as the membership proofs with minimal effort as new items are added to the set or as existing items are removed from it. - Items cannot be removed before they were added. - It is...
Bottleneck complexity is an efficiency measure of secure multiparty computation (MPC) introduced by Boyle et al. (ICALP 2018) to achieve load-balancing. Roughly speaking, it is defined as the maximum communication complexity required by any player within the protocol execution. Since it was shown to be impossible to achieve sublinear bottleneck complexity in the number of players $n$ for all functions, a prior work constructed MPC protocols with low bottleneck complexity for specific...
In this paper, we propose the first linear two-party secure-computation private set intersection (PSI) protocol, in the semi-honest adversary model, computing the following functionality. One of the parties ($P_X$) inputs a set of items $X = \{x_j \mid 1 \le j \le n_X\}$, whereas the other party ($P_Y$) inputs a set of items $Y = \{y_i \mid 1\le i \le n_Y \}$ and a set of corresponding data pairs $D_Y = \{ (d_i^0,d_i^1) \mid 1 \le i \le n_Y\}$ having the same cardinality with $Y$. While...
A Bloom filter is a data structure that maintains a succinct and probabilistic representation of a set $S\subseteq U$ of elements from a universe $U$. It supports approximate membership queries. The price of the succinctness is allowing some error, namely false positives: for any $x\notin S$, it might answer `Yes' but with a small (non-negligible) probability. When dealing with such data structures in adversarial settings, we need to define the correctness guarantee and formalize the...
We study the security of Probabilistic Data Structures (PDS) for handling Approximate Membership Queries (AMQ); prominent examples of AMQ-PDS are Bloom and Cuckoo filters. AMQ-PDS are increasingly being deployed in environments where adversaries can gain benefit from carefully selecting inputs, for example to increase the false positive rate of an AMQ-PDS. They are also being used in settings where the inputs are sensitive and should remain private in the face of adversaries who can...
Private set intersection (PSI) protocols allow a set of mutually distrustful parties, each holding a private set of items, to compute the intersection over all their sets, such that no other information is revealed. PSI has a wide variety of applications including online advertising (e.g., efficacy computation), security (e.g., botnet detection, intrusion detection), proximity testing (e.g., COVID-19 contact tracing), and more. Private set intersection is a rapidly developing area and there...
In this paper, we propose a new private set intersection (PSI) protocol with bi-oblivious data transfer that computes the following functionality. One of the parties $P_1$ inputs a set of items $X$ and a set of data pairs $D_1 = \{ (d_0^j,d_1^j)\}$ and the other party $P_2$ inputs a set of items $Y$. While $P_1$ outputs nothing, $P_2$ outputs a set of data $D_2 = \{ d_{b_j}^j \mid b_j \in \{0,1\}\}$ dependent on the intersection of $X$ and $Y$. This functionality is generally required when...
We present a 2-party private set intersection (PSI) protocol which provides security against malicious participants, yet is almost as fast as the fastest known semi-honest PSI protocol of Kolesnikov et al. (CCS 2016). Our protocol is based on a new approach for two-party PSI, which can be instantiated to provide security against either malicious or semi-honest adversaries. The protocol is unique in that the only difference between the semi-honest and malicious versions is an instantiation...
Probabilistic data structures use space-efficient representations of data in order to (approximately) respond to queries about the data. Traditionally, these structures are accompanied by probabilistic bounds on query-response errors. These bounds implicitly assume benign attack models, in which the data and the queries are chosen non-adaptively, and independent of the randomness used to construct the representation. Yet probabilistic data structures are increasingly used in settings where...
In the area of cloud computing, judging the fulfillment of service-level agreements on a technical level is gaining more and more importance. To support this we introduce privacy preserving set relations as inclusiveness and disjointness based on Bloom filters. We propose to compose them in a slightly different way by applying a keyed hash function. Besides discussing the correctness of the set relations, we analyze how this impacts the privacy of the sets content as well as providing...
In this work, we discuss our successful efforts for industry deployment of a cryptographic secure computation protocol. The problem we consider is privately computing aggregate conversion rate of advertising campaigns. This underlying functionality can be abstracted as Private Intersection-Sum (PI-Sum) with Cardinality. In this setting two parties hold datasets containing user identifiers, and one of the parties additionally has an integer value associated with each of its user identifiers....
By allowing a large number of users to behave as readers or writers, Multi-User Searchable Encryption (MUSE) raises new security and performance challenges beyond the typical requirements of Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE). In this paper we identify two core mandatory requirements of MUSE protocols being privacy in face of users colluding with the CSP and low complexity for the users, pointing that no existing MUSE protocol satisfies these two requirements at the same time. We then...
We devise a virtual black-box (VBB) obfuscator for querying whether set elements are stored within Bloom filters, with security based on the Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) problem and strongly universal hash functions. Our construction uses an abstracted encoding scheme that we instantiate using the Gentry, Gorbunov and Halevi (GGH15) multilinear map, with an explicit security reduction to RLWE. This represents an improvement on the functionality and security guarantees compared with the...
Private set intersection (PSI) refers to a special case of secure two-party computation in which the parties each have a set of items and compute the intersection of these sets without revealing any additional information. In this paper we present improvements to practical PSI providing security in the presence of {\em malicious} adversaries. Our starting point is the protocol of Dong, Chen \& Wen (CCS 2013) that is based on Bloom filters. We identify a bug in their malicious-secure variant...
A private set intersection protocol consists of two parties, a Sender and a Receiver, each with a secret input set. The protocol aims to have the Receiver output an intersection of the two sets while keeping the elements in the sets secret. This thesis thoroughly analyzes four recently published set intersection protocols, where it explains each protocol and checks whether it satisfies its corresponding security definition. The first two protocols [PSZ14, PSSZ15a] use random oblivious...
AnNotify is a scalable service for private, timely and low-cost online notifications, based on anonymous communication, sharding, dummy queries, and Bloom filters. We present the design and analysis of AnNotify, as well as an evaluation of its costs. We outline the design of AnNotify and calculate the concrete advantage of an adversary observing multiple queries. We present a number of extensions, such as generic presence and broadcast notifications, and applications, including notifications...
Private set operation (PSO) protocols provide a natural way of securely performing operations on data sets, such that crucial details of the input sets are not revealed. Such protocols have an ever-increasing number of practical applications, particularly when implementing privacy-preserving data mining schemes. Protocols for computing private set operations have been prevalent in multi-party computation literature over the past decade, and in the case of private set intersection (PSI), have...
Many efficient data structures use randomness, allowing them to improve upon deterministic ones. Usually, their efficiency and correctness are analyzed using probabilistic tools under the assumption that the inputs and queries are independent of the internal randomness of the data structure. In this work, we consider data structures in a more robust model, which we call the adversarial model. Roughly speaking, this model allows an adversary to choose inputs and queries adaptively according...
We introduce Accountable Storage, a framework allowing a client with small local space to outsource n file blocks to an untrusted server and be able (at any point in time after outsourcing) to provably compute how many bits have been discarded by the server. Such protocols offer ``provable storage insurance" to a client: In case of a data loss, the client can be compensated with a dollar amount proportional to the damage that has occurred, forcing the server to be more ``accountable" for his...
Lightweight Bitcoin clients are gaining increasing adoption among Bitcoin users, owing to their reduced resource and bandwidth consumption. These clients support a simplified payment verification (SPV) mode as they are only required to download and verify a part of the block chain — thus supporting the usage of Bitcoin on constrained devices, such as smartphones. SPV clients rely on Bloom filters to receive transactions that are relevant to their local wallet. These filters embed all the...
The wide availability of inexpensive positioning systems made it possible to embed them into smartphones and other personal devices. This marked the beginning of location-aware applications, where users request personalized services based on their geographic position. The location of a user is, however, highly sensitive information: the user's privacy can be preserved if only the minimum amount of information needed to provide the service is disclosed at any time. While some applications,...
The increasing penetration of Online Social Networks (OSNs) prompts the need for effectively accessing and utilizing social networking information. In numerous applications, users need to make trust and/or access control decisions involving other (possibly stranger) users, and one important factor is often the existence of common social relationships. This motivates the need for secure and privacy-preserving techniques allowing users to assess whether or not they have mutual friends. This...
RFID can be used for a variety of applications, e.g., to conveniently pay for public transportation. However, achieving security and privacy of payment is challenging due to the extreme resource restrictions of RFID tags. In this paper, we propose PSP -- a secure, RFID-based protocol for privacy-preserving payment. Similar to traditional electronic cash, the user of a tag can pay access to a metro using his tag and so called {coins} of a virtual currency. With PSP, tags do not need to store...
It is often necessary for two or more or more parties that do not fully trust each other to selectively share data. We propose a search scheme based on Bloom filters and Pohlig-Hellman encryption. A semi-trusted third party can transform one party's search queries to a form suitable for querying the other party's database, in such a way that neither the third party nor the database owner can see the original query. Furthermore, the encryption keys used to construct the Bloom filters are...
A secure index is a data structure that allows a querier with a ``trapdoor'' for a word x to test in O(1) time only if the index contains x; The index reveals no information about its contents without valid trapdoors, and trapdoors can only be generated with a secret key. Secure indexes are a natural extension of the problem of constructing data structures with privacy guarantees such as those provided by oblivious and history independent data structures. In this paper, we formally define a...