Title
DEKS: A Secure Cloud-Based Searchable Service Can Make Attackers Pay
Abstract
Many practical secure systems have been designed to prevent real-world attacks via maximizing the attacking cost so as to reduce attack intentions. Inspired by this philosophy, we propose a new concept named delay encryption with keyword search (DEKS) to resist the notorious keyword guessing attack (KGA), in the context of secure cloud-based searchable services. Avoiding the use of complex (and unreasonable) assumptions, as compared to existing works, DEKS optionally leverages a catalyst that enables one (e.g., a valid data user) to easily execute encryption; without the catalyst, any unauthenticated system insiders and outsiders take severe time consumption on encryption. By this, DEKS can overwhelm a KGA attacker in the encryption stage before it obtains any advantage. We leverage the repeated squaring function, which is the core building block of our design, to construct the first DEKS instance. The experimental results show that DEKS is practical in thwarting KGA for both small and large-scale datasets. For example, in the Wikipedia, a KGA attacker averagely takes 7.23 years to break DEKS when the delay parameter $$T=2^{24}$$ . The parameter T can be flexibly adjusted based on practical needs, and theoretically, its upper bound is infinite.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/978-3-031-17146-8_5
Computer Security – ESORICS 2022
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Delay encryption with keyword search, Keyword guessing attack, Security, Privacy
Conference
13555
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zheng Yubo100.34
Xu Peng200.34
Wei Wang315611.08
Chen Tianyang400.34
Willy Susilo54823353.18
Kaitai Liang661245.13
Jin Hai700.34