Revisiting the attacker's knowledge in inference attacks against Searchable Symmetric Encryption

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Damie, Marc, Leger, Jean-Benoist, Hahn, Florian, Peter, Andreas
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Damie, Marc
Leger, Jean-Benoist
Hahn, Florian
Peter, Andreas
author_facet Damie, Marc
Leger, Jean-Benoist
Hahn, Florian
Peter, Andreas
contents Encrypted search schemes have been proposed to address growing privacy concerns. However, several leakage-abuse attacks have highlighted some security vulnerabilities. Recent attacks assumed an attacker's knowledge containing data ``similar'' to the indexed data. However, this vague assumption is barely discussed in literature: how likely is it for an attacker to obtain a "similar enough" data? Our paper provides novel statistical tools usable on any attack in this setting to analyze its sensitivity to data similarity. First, we introduce a mathematical model based on statistical estimators to analytically understand the attackers' knowledge and the notion of similarity. Second, we conceive statistical tools to model the influence of the similarity on the attack accuracy. We apply our tools on three existing attacks to answer questions such as: is similarity the only factor influencing accuracy of a given attack? Third, we show that the enforcement of a maximum index size can make the ``similar-data'' assumption harder to satisfy. In particular, we propose a statistical method to estimate an appropriate maximum size for a given attack and dataset. For the best known attack on the Enron dataset, a maximum index size of 200 guarantees (with high probability) the attack accuracy to be below 5%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_09879
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting the attacker's knowledge in inference attacks against Searchable Symmetric Encryption
Damie, Marc
Leger, Jean-Benoist
Hahn, Florian
Peter, Andreas
Cryptography and Security
Encrypted search schemes have been proposed to address growing privacy concerns. However, several leakage-abuse attacks have highlighted some security vulnerabilities. Recent attacks assumed an attacker's knowledge containing data ``similar'' to the indexed data. However, this vague assumption is barely discussed in literature: how likely is it for an attacker to obtain a "similar enough" data? Our paper provides novel statistical tools usable on any attack in this setting to analyze its sensitivity to data similarity. First, we introduce a mathematical model based on statistical estimators to analytically understand the attackers' knowledge and the notion of similarity. Second, we conceive statistical tools to model the influence of the similarity on the attack accuracy. We apply our tools on three existing attacks to answer questions such as: is similarity the only factor influencing accuracy of a given attack? Third, we show that the enforcement of a maximum index size can make the ``similar-data'' assumption harder to satisfy. In particular, we propose a statistical method to estimate an appropriate maximum size for a given attack and dataset. For the best known attack on the Enron dataset, a maximum index size of 200 guarantees (with high probability) the attack accuracy to be below 5%.
title Revisiting the attacker's knowledge in inference attacks against Searchable Symmetric Encryption
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09879