Paper Info
Title
AUTOCRYPT: enabling homomorphic computation on servers to protect sensitive web content
Abstract
Web servers are vulnerable to a large class of attacks which can allow network attacker to steal sensitive web content. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of a web server architecture, wherein the vulnerable server VM runs on a trusted cloud. All sensitive web content is made available to the vulnerable server VM in encrypted form, thereby limiting the effectiveness of data-stealing attacks through server VM compromise. In this context, the main challenge is to allow the legitimate functionality of the untrusted server VM to work. As a step towards this goal, we develop a tool called AutoCrypt, which transforms a subset of existing C functionality in the web stack to operate on encrypted sensitive content. We show that such a transformation is feasible for several standard Unix utilities available in a typical LAMP stack, with no developer effort. Key to achieving this expressiveness over encrypted data, is our scheme to combine and convert between partially-homomorphic encryption (PHE) schemes using a small TCB in the trusted cloud hypervisor. We show that x86 code transformed with AutoCrypt achieves performance that is significantly better than its alternatives (downloading to a trusted client, or using fully-homomorphic encryption).
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1145/2508859.2516666
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Keywords
Field
DocType
encrypted sensitive content,untrusted server vm,encrypted form,web server,sensitive web content,vulnerable server vm,homomorphic computation,encrypted data,web server architecture,vulnerable server,server vm compromise,type system,homomorphic encryption,web security
Trusted client,Internet privacy,Computer science,Computer security,Server,Upload,Encryption,Web service,Web server,Application server,Cloud computing
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.64
40
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shruti Tople1483.44
Shweta Shinde21739.15
Zhaofeng Chen32068.64
Prateek Saxena4191597.73