No Arabic abstract
Several cybersecurity domains, such as ransomware detection, forensics and data analysis, require methods to reliably identify encrypted data fragments. Typically, current approaches employ statistics derived from byte-level distribution, such as entropy estimation, to identify encrypted fragments. However, modern content types use compression techniques which alter data distribution pushing it closer to the uniform distribution. The result is that current approaches exhibit unreliable encryption detection performance when compressed data appears in the dataset. Furthermore, proposed approaches are typically evaluated over few data types and fragment sizes, making it hard to assess their practical applicability. This paper compares existing statistical tests on a large, standardized dataset and shows that current approaches consistently fail to distinguish encrypted and compressed data on both small and large fragment sizes. We address these shortcomings and design EnCoD, a learning-based classifier which can reliably distinguish compressed and encrypted data. We evaluate EnCoD on a dataset of 16 different file types and fragment sizes ranging from 512B to 8KB. Our results highlight that EnCoD outperforms current approaches by a wide margin, with accuracy ranging from ~82 for 512B fragments up to ~92 for 8KB data fragments. Moreover, EnCoD can pinpoint the exact format of a given data fragment, rather than performing only binary classification like previous approaches.
Reliable identification of encrypted file fragments is a requirement for several security applications, including ransomware detection, digital forensics, and traffic analysis. A popular approach consists of estimating high entropy as a proxy for randomness. However, many modern content types (e.g. office documents, media files, etc.) are highly compressed for storage and transmission efficiency. Compression algorithms also output high-entropy data, thus reducing the accuracy of entropy-based encryption detectors. Over the years, a variety of approaches have been proposed to distinguish encrypted file fragments from high-entropy compressed fragments. However, these approaches are typically only evaluated over a few, select data types and fragment sizes, which makes a fair assessment of their practical applicability impossible. This paper aims to close this gap by comparing existing statistical tests on a large, standardized dataset. Our results show that current approaches cannot reliably tell apart encryption and compression, even for large fragment sizes. To address this issue, we design EnCoD, a learning-based classifier which can reliably distinguish compressed and encrypted data, starting with fragments as small as 512 bytes. We evaluate EnCoD against current approaches over a large dataset of different data types, showing that it outperforms current state-of-the-art for most considered fragment sizes and data types.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables a simple, attractive framework for secure search. Compared to other secure search systems, no costly setup procedure is necessary; it is sufficient for the client merely to upload the encrypted database to the server. Confidentiality is provided because the server works only on the encrypted query and records. While the search functionality is enabled by the full homomorphism of the encryption scheme. For this reason, researchers have been paying increasing attention to this problem. Since Akavia et al. (CCS 2018) presented a framework for secure search on FHE encrypted data and gave a working implementation called SPiRiT, several more efficient realizations have been proposed. In this paper, we identify the main bottlenecks of this framework and show how to significantly improve the performance of FHE-base secure search. In particular, 1. To retrieve $ell$ matching items, the existing framework needs to repeat the protocol $ell$ times sequentially. In our new framework, all matching items are retrieved in parallel in a single protocol execution. 2. The most recent work by Wren et al. (CCS 2020) requires $O(n)$ multiplications to compute the first matching index. Our solution requires no homomorphic multiplication, instead using only additions and scalar multiplications to encode all matching indices. 3. Our implementation and experiments show that to fetch 16 matching records, our system gives an 1800X speed-up over the state of the art in fetching the query results resulting in a 26X speed-up for the full search functionality.
Emerging neural networks based machine learning techniques such as deep learning and its variants have shown tremendous potential in many application domains. However, they raise serious privacy concerns due to the risk of leakage of highly privacy-sensitive data when data collected from users is used to train neural network models to support predictive tasks. To tackle such serious privacy concerns, several privacy-preserving approaches have been proposed in the literature that use either secure multi-party computation (SMC) or homomorphic encryption (HE) as the underlying mechanisms. However, neither of these cryptographic approaches provides an efficient solution towards constructing a privacy-preserving machine learning model, as well as supporting both the training and inference phases. To tackle the above issue, we propose a CryptoNN framework that supports training a neural network model over encrypted data by using the emerging functional encryption scheme instead of SMC or HE. We also construct a functional encryption scheme for basic arithmetic computation to support the requirement of the proposed CryptoNN framework. We present performance evaluation and security analysis of the underlying crypto scheme and show through our experiments that CryptoNN achieves accuracy that is similar to those of the baseline neural network models on the MNIST dataset.
Data confidentiality is an important requirement for clients when outsourcing databases to the cloud. Trusted execution environments, such as Intel SGX, offer an efficient, hardware-based solution to this cryptographic problem. Existing solutions are not optimized for column-oriented, in-memory databases and pose impractical memory requirements on the enclave. We present EncDBDB, a novel approach for client-controlled encryption of a column-oriented, in-memory databases allowing range searches using an enclave. EncDBDB offers nine encrypted dictionaries, which provide different security, performance and storage efficiency tradeoffs for the data. It is especially suited for complex, read-oriented, analytic queries, e.g., as present in data warehouses. The computational overhead compared to plaintext processing is within a millisecond even for databases with millions of entries and the leakage is limited. Compressed encrypted data requires less space than a corresponding plaintext column. Furthermore, the resulting code - and data - in the enclave is very small reducing the potential for security-relevant implementation errors and side-channel leakages.
Spatial queries like range queries, nearest neighbor, circular range queries etc. are the most widely used queries in the location-based applications. Building secure and efficient solutions for these queries in the cloud computing framework is critical and has been an area of active research. This paper focuses on the problem of Secure Circular Range Queries (SCRQ), where client submits an encrypted query (consisting of a center point and radius of the circle) and the cloud (storing encrypted data points) has to return the points lying inside the circle. The existing solutions for this problem suffer from various disadvantages such as high processing time which is proportional to square of the query radius, query generation phase which is directly proportional to the number of points covered by the query etc. This paper presents solution for the above problem which is much more efficient than the existing solutions. Three protocols are proposed with varying characteristics. It is shown that all the three protocols are secure. The proposed protocols can be extended to multiple dimensions and thus are able to handle Secure Hypersphere Range Queries (SHRQ) as well. Internally the proposed protocols use pairing-based cryptography and a concept of lookup table. To enable the efficient use of limited size lookup table, a new storage scheme is presented. The proposed storage scheme enables the protocols to handle query with much larger radius values. Using the SHRQ protocols, we also propose a mechanism to answer the Secure range Queries. Extensive performance evaluation has been done to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed protocols