Privacy-preserving outsourcing of brute-force key searches

Ghassan O. Karame, Srdjan Čapkun, Ueli Maurer

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    Abstract

    In this work, we investigate the privacy-preserving properties of encryption algorithms in the special case where encrypted data might be brute-force decrypted in a distributed setting. For that purpose, we consider a problem where a supervisor holds a ciphertext and wants to search for the corresponding key assisted by a set of helper nodes, without the nodes learning any information about the plaintext or the decryption key. We call this a privacy-preserving cryptographic key search. We provide a model for privacy-preserving cryptographic searches and we introduce two types of privacy-preserving key search problems: plaintext-hiding and key-hiding cryptographic search. We show that a number of private-key and public-key encryption schemes enable the construction of efficient privacy-preserving solvers for plaintext hiding searches. We also discuss possible constructions of privacy-preserving solvers for key-hiding cryptographic searches. Our results highlight the need to consider the property of enabling efficient privacy-preserving solvers as an additional criterion for choosing which cryptographic algorithm to use.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationCCSW'11 - Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security Workshop
    Pages101-112
    Number of pages12
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2011
    Event3rd ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security Workshop, CCSW'11, Co-located with the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2011 - Chicago, IL, United States
    Duration: 21 Oct 201121 Oct 2011

    Other

    Other3rd ACM Workshop on Cloud Computing Security Workshop, CCSW'11, Co-located with the 18th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2011
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityChicago, IL
    Period21/10/1121/10/11

    Keywords

    • Brute-force key search
    • Distributed computing
    • Privacy-preserving solvers

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