Searchable Symmetric Encryption, Revisited

Seny Kamara
Johns Hopkins University

Monday, April 17, 2:00PM
Burchard 124
Computer Science Department
Stevens Institute of Technology
 

Abstract


Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) allows a party to outsource the storage of its data to another party in a private manner, while maintaining the ability to selectively search over it. This problem has been the focus of active research and several security definitions and constructions have been proposed. In this talk we will review existing security definitions, pointing out their shortcomings, and propose new and stronger definitions which we prove equivalent. We then give constructions that are secure under our new definitions. Interestingly, in addition to satisfying stronger security guarantees, our constructions are more efficient than all previous constructions.

This is joint work with Reza Curtmola, Juan Garay and Rafail Ostrovsky.