Ghous Amjad

dblp:216/4254 · DBLP profile ↗
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5ranked-venue papers
5as first author
3since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

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Security and privacy · 5 · 5 first-author · 3 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 RSA Blind Signatures with Public Metadata
abstract
Anonymous tokens are, essentially, digital signature schemes that enable issuers to provide users with signatures without learning the user inputs or the final signatures. These primitives allow applications to propagate trust while simultaneously protecting the user identity. They have become a core component for improving the privacy of several real-world applications including ad measurements, authorization protocols, spam detection, and VPNs. In certain applications, it is natural to associate signatures with specific public metadata, ensuring that trust is only propagated with respect to only a certain set of users and scenarios. To solve this, we study the notion of anonymous tokens with public metadata. We present a variant of RSA blind signatures with public metadata where issuers may only generate signatures that verify for a certain choice of public metadata that is a modification of a scheme by Abe and Fujisaki. Our protocol exclusively uses standard cryptography with widely available implementations. We prove security from the one-more RSA assumptions with multiple exponents that we introduce. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the concrete security bounds should be nearly identical to standard RSA blind signatures. We show that our protocol incurs minimal overhead over standard RSA blind signatures and report anonymous telemetry for a real-world deployment to showcase its scalability. Following our work, our protocol has been proposed as a technical specification in an IRTF internet draft.
Ghous Amjad, Kevin Yeo, Moti Yung
Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol.1
2023 Injection-Secure Structured and Searchable Symmetric Encryption
Ghous Amjad, Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz
ASIACRYPT (6)1
2023 Dynamic Volume-Hiding Encrypted Multi-Maps with Applications to Searchable Encryption
abstract
We study encrypted storage schemes where a client outsources data to an untrusted third-party server (such as a cloud storage provider) while maintaining the ability to privately query and dynamically update the data. We focus on encrypted multi-maps (EMMs), a structured encryption (STE) scheme that stores pairs of label and value tuples. EMMs allow queries on labels and return the associated value tuple. As responses are variable-length, EMMs are subject to volume leakage attacks introduced by Kellaris et al. [CCS'16]. To prevent these attacks, volume-hiding EMMs were introduced by Kamara and Moataz [Eurocrypt'19] that hide the label volumes (i.e., the value tuple lengths). As our main contribution, we present the first fully dynamic volume-hiding EMMs that are both asymptotically and concretely efficient. Furthermore, they are simultaneously forward and backward private which are the de-facto standard security notions for dynamic STE schemes. Additionally, we implement our schemes to showcase their concrete efficiency. Our experimental evaluations show that our constructions are able to add dynamicity with minimal to no additional cost compared to the prior best static volume-hiding schemes of Patel et al. [CCS'19].
Ghous Amjad, Sarvar Patel, Giuseppe Persiano, Kevin Yeo, Moti Yung
Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol.1
2019 Breach-Resistant Structured Encryption
abstract
Abstract Motivated by the problem of data breaches, we formalize a notion of security for dynamic structured encryption (STE) schemes that guarantees security against a snapshot adversary; that is, an adversary that receives a copy of the encrypted structure at various times but does not see the transcripts related to any queries. In particular, we focus on the construction of dynamic encrypted multi-maps which are used to build efficient searchable symmetric encryption schemes, graph encryption schemes and encrypted relational databases. Interestingly, we show that a form of snapshot security we refer to as breach resistance implies previously-studied notions such as a (weaker version) of history independence and write-only obliviousness. Moreover, we initiate the study of dual-secure dynamic STE constructions: schemes that are forward-private against a persistent adversary and breach-resistant against a snapshot adversary. The notion of forward privacy guarantees that updates to the encrypted structure do not reveal their association to any query made in the past. As a concrete instantiation, we propose a new dual-secure dynamic multi-map encryption scheme that outperforms all existing constructions; including schemes that are not dual-secure. Our construction has query complexity that grows with the selectivity of the query and the number of deletes since the client executed a linear-time rebuild protocol which can be de-amortized. We implemented our scheme (with the de-amortized rebuild protocol) and evaluated its concrete efficiency empirically. Our experiments show that it is highly efficient with queries taking less than 1 microsecond per label/value pair.
Ghous Amjad, Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz
Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol.1
2018 Forgetting with Puzzles: Using Cryptographic Puzzles to support Digital Forgetting
abstract
Digital forgetting deals with the unavailability of content uploaded to web and storage servers after the data has served its purpose. The content on the servers can be deleted manually, but this does not prevent data archival and access at different storage locations. This is problematic since then the data may be accessed for unintended or even malicious purposes long after the owners have decided to abandon the public availability of their data. Approaches which assign a lifetime value to data or use heuristics like interest in data to make it inaccessible after some time have been proposed, but digital forgetting is still in its infancy and there are a number of open problems with the proposed approaches.
Ghous Amjad, Muhammad Shujaat Mirza, Christina Pöpper
CODASPY1