Protected database search systems cryptographically isolate the roles of reading from, writing to, and administering the database. This separation limits unnecessary administrator access and protects data in the case of system breaches. Since protected search was introduced in 2000, the area has grown rapidly, systems are offered by academia, start-ups, and established companies. However, there is no best protected search system or set of techniques. Design of such systems is a balancing act between security, functionality, performance, and usability. This challenge is made more difficult by ongoing database specialization, as some users will want the functionality of SQL, NoSQL, or NewSQL databases. This database evolution will continue, and the protected search community should be able to quickly provide functionality consistent with newly invented databases. At the same time, the community must accurately and clearly characterize the tradeoffs between different approaches. To address these challenges, we provide the following contributions:1) An identification of the important primitive operations across database paradigms. We find there are a small number of base operations that can be used and combined to support a large number of database paradigms.2) An evaluation of the current state of protected search systems in implementing these base operations. This evaluation describes the main approaches and tradeoffs for each base operation. Furthermore, it puts protected search in the context of unprotected search, identifying key gaps in functionality.3) An analysis of attacks against protected search for different base queries.4) A roadmap and tools for transforming a protected search system into a protected database, including an open-source performance evaluation platform and initial user opinions of protected search.

Abstract In this paper, we consider a setting where a client wants to outsource storage of a large amount of private data and then perform substring search queries on the data – given a data string s and a search string p, find all occurrences of p as a substring of s. First, we formalize an encryption paradigm that we call queryable encryption, which generalizes searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) and structured encryption. Then, we construct a queryable encryption scheme for substring queries. Our construction uses suffix trees and achieves asymptotic efficiency comparable to that of unencrypted suffix trees. Encryption of a string of length n takes O(λn) time and produces a ciphertext of size O(λn), and querying for a substring of length m that occurs k times takes O(λm+k) time and three rounds of communication. Our security definition guarantees correctness of query results and privacy of data and queries against a malicious adversary. Following the line of work started by Curtmola et al. (ACM CCS 2006), in order to construct more efficient schemes we allow the query protocol to leak some limited information that is captured precisely in the definition. We prove security of our substring-searchable encryption scheme against malicious adversaries, where the query protocol leaks limited information about memory access patterns through the suffix tree of the encrypted string.

We introduce Drifting Keys (DKs), a simple new approach to detecting device impersonation. DKs enable detection of complete compromise by an attacker of the device and its secret state, e.g., cryptographic keys. A DK evolves within a device randomly over time. Thus an attacker will create DKs that randomly diverge from those in the original, valid device over time, alerting a trusted verifier to the attack. DKs may be transmitted unidirectionally from a device, eliminating interaction between the device and verifier. Device emissions of DK values can be quite compact - even just a single bit - and DK evolution and emission require minimal computation. Thus DKs are well suited for highly constrained devices, such as sensors and hardware authentication tokens. We offer a formal adversarial model for DKs, and present a simple scheme that we prove essentially optimal (undominated) for a natural class of attack timelines. We explore application of this scheme to one-time passcode authentication tokens. Using the logs of a large enterprise, we experimentally study the effectiveness of DKs in detecting the compromise of such tokens.

In the above titled paper (ibid., vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 611-627, Dec. 09), due to a production error, the affiliations of two of the authors were listed incorrectly. The correct affiliations are presented here. Also, the name of the last author in the affiliations footnote was printed incorrectly. The correct name is P. Y. A. Ryan.

Scantegrity II is an enhancement for existing paper ballot systems. It allows voters to verify election integrity - from their selections on the ballot all the way to the final tally - by noting codes and checking for them online. Voters mark Scantegrity II ballots just as with conventional optical scan, but using a special ballot marking pen. Marking a selection with this pen makes legible an otherwise invisible preprinted confirmation code. Confirmation codes are independent and random for each potential selection on each ballot. To verify that their individual votes are recorded correctly, voters can look up their ballot serial numbers online and verify that their confirmation codes are posted correctly. The confirmation codes do not allow voters to prove how they voted. However, the confirmation codes constitute convincing evidence of error or malfeasance in the event that incorrect codes are posted online. Correctness of the final tally with respect to the published codes is proven by election officials in a manner that can be verified by any interested party. Thus, compromise of either ballot chain of custody or the software systems cannot undetectably affect election integrity. Scantegrity II has been implemented and tested in small elections in which ballots were scanned either at the polling place or centrally. Preparations for its use in a public sector election have commenced.

In most forward-secure signature constructions, a program that updates a user's private signing key must have full access to the private key. Unfortunately, these schemes are incompatible with several security architectures including Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG) and S/MIME, where the private key is encrypted under a user password as a "second factor" of security, in case the private key storage is corrupted, but the password is not.We introduce the concept of forward-secure signatures with untrusted update, where the key update can be performed on an encrypted version of the key. Forward secure signatures with untrusted update allow us to add forward security to signatures, while still keeping passwords as a second factor of security. We provide a construction that has performance characteristics comparable with the best existing forward-secure signatures. In addition, we describe how to modify the Bellare-Miner forward secure signature scheme to achieve untrusted update.