Recent Papers

Recent news reveals a powerful attacker which breaks data confidentiality by acquiring cryptographic keys, by means of coercion or backdoors in cryptographic software. Once the encryption key is exposed, the only viable measure to preserve data confidentiality is to limit the attackers access to the cipher text. This may be achieved, for example, by spreading cipher text blocks across servers in multiple administrative domainsthus assuming that the adversary cannot compromise all of them. Nevertheless, if data is encrypted with existing schemes, an adversary equipped with the encryption key, can still compromise a single server and decrypt the cipher text blocks stored therein. In this paper, we study data confidentiality against an adversary which knows the encryption key and has access to a large fraction of the cipher text blocks. To this end, we propose Bastion, a novel and efficient scheme that guarantees data confidentiality even if the encryption key is leaked and the adversary has access to almost all cipher text blocks. We analyze the security of Bastion, and we evaluate its performance by means of a prototype implementation. We also discuss practical insights with respect to the integration of Bastion in commercial dispersed storage systems. Our evaluation results suggest that Bastion is well-suited for integration in existing systems since it incurs less than 5% overhead compared to existing semantically secure encryption modes.

Copyright © 2023 E. Venkatesh. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.