Practical Attacks on Relational Databases Protected via Searchable Encryption

• Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) schemes are commonly proposed to enable search in a protected unstructured documents such as email archives or any set of sensitive text files. However, some SSE schemes have been recently proposed in order to protect relational databases. Most of the previous attacks on SSE schemes have only targeted its common use case, protecting unstructured data. In this work, we propose a new inference attack on relational databases protected via SSE schemes. Our inference attack enables a passive adversary with only basic knowledge about the meta-data information of the target relational database to recover the attribute names of some observed queries. This violates query privacy since the attribute name of a query is secret.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Information Systems (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Query languages

Query processing

Security of data

E-mail archives

Inference attacks

Passive adversary

Relational Database

Searchable encryptions

Symmetric encryption

Unstructured data

Unstructured documents

Cryptography

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)