Eurus: Towards an Efficient Searchable Symmetric Encryption With Size Pattern Protection

Abstract

To achieve efficiently search and update on outsourced encrypted data, dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DSSE) was proposed by just leaking some well-defined leakages. Though small, many recent works show that an attacker can exploit these leakages to undermine the security of existing DSSE schemes. In particular, an attacker can exploit even seemingly harmless size pattern to perform severe attacks. Many exiting schemes resort to oblivious RAM (ORAM) to hide search/access pattern; however, even such powerful cryptographic primitive cannot protect size pattern leakage. In this article, we first show that size pattern can lead to more information leakages, which is not well studied or protected by existing schemes. We then extend the existing privacy notion for DSSE to capture the size pattern leakage, achieving a strong forward and backward privacy definition. Following the definition, we propose a new DSSE scheme Eurus. Eurus can eliminate search/access pattern by relying on a multi-server ORAM scheme, meanwhile reducing size pattern with reasonable efficiency. We show that Eurus can reduce leakage significantly with better efficiency, compared with state-of-the-art leakage reduction schemes.