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Sorting and Searching Behind the Curtain

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Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8975))

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Abstract

We propose a framework where a user can outsource his data to a cloud server in an encrypted form and then request the server to perform computations on this data and sort the result. Sorting is achieved via a novel protocol where the server is assisted by a secure coprocessor that is required to have only minimal computational and memory resources. The server and the coprocessor are assumed to be honest but curious, i.e., they honestly follow the protocol but are interested in learning more about the user data. We refer to the new protocol as private outsourced sorting since it guarantees that neither the server nor the coprocessor learn anything about user data as long as they are non-colluding. We formally define private outsourced sorting and present an efficient construction that is based on an encryption scheme with semi-homomorphic properties.

As an application of our private sort we present MRSE: the first scheme for outsourced search over encrypted data that efficiently answers multi-term queries with the result ranked using frequency of query terms in the data, while maintaining data privacy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www-03.ibm.com/security/cryptocards/pciecc/overview.shtml.

  2. 2.

    http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=C29x.

  3. 3.

    We note that \({v}\) has to be encrypted using the second layer of Paillier in order to use the homomorphic properties of the cryptosystem.

  4. 4.

    We note that one should not confuse our problem with Multi-Party Computation protocols for sorting [16, 17], where every party has an input array and the goal is to output to every participating party the sorting of all inputs combined.

  5. 5.

    Stemming and removal of stop words is outside of the scope of our paper.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Seny Kamara, Markulf Kohlweiss and Roberto Tamassia for useful discussions and suggestions on how to improve the results and the write-up in hand. Olga Ohrimenko worked on this project in part while at Brown University, where her research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants CNS–1012060 and CNS–1228485. Foteini Baldimtsi was supported by the Center for Reliable Information Systems and Cyber Security (RISCS) and grant CNS–1012910 (Boston University), and also in part by the FINER project by Greek Secretariat of Research Technology (University of Athens) and CNS–0964379 (Brown University).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Boston University, Boston, USA

    Foteini Baldimtsi

  2. University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Foteini Baldimtsi

  3. Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

    Olga Ohrimenko

Authors
  1. Foteini Baldimtsi
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  2. Olga Ohrimenko
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Correspondence to Olga Ohrimenko .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria

    Rainer Böhme

  2. NTT Laboratories, Tokyo, Japan

    Tatsuaki Okamoto

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Baldimtsi, F., Ohrimenko, O. (2015). Sorting and Searching Behind the Curtain. In: Böhme, R., Okamoto, T. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8975. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47854-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-47854-7_8

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