Graph Encryption: Going Beyond Encrypted Keyword Search

This is a guest post by Xianrui Meng from Boston University about a paper he presented at CCS 2015, written in collaboration with Kobbi Nissim, George Kollios and myself. Note that Xianrui is on the job market. Encrypted search has attracted a lot of attention from practitioners and researchers in academia and industry. In previous posts, Seny already described different ways one can search on encrypted data. Here, I would like to discuss search on encrypted graph databases which are gaining a lot of popularity.

Applied Crypto Highlights: Searchable Encryption with Ranked Results

This is the second in a series of guest posts highlighting new research in applied cryptography. This post is written by Foteini Baldimtsi who is a postdoc at Boston University and Olya Ohrimenko who is a postdoc at Microsoft Research. Note that Olya is on the job market this year. Modern cloud services let their users outsource data as well as request computations on it. Due to potentially sensitive content of users' data and distrust in cloud services, it is natural for users to outsource their data encrypted.

How to Search on Encrypted Data: Searchable Symmetric Encryption (Part 5)

This is the fifth part of a series on searching on encrypted data. 1, 2, 3, 4. In the previous post we covered the most secure way to search on encrypted data: oblivious RAMs (ORAM). I always recommend ORAM-based solutions for encrypted search whenever possible; namely, for small- to moderate-size data 1. Of course, the main limitation of ORAM is efficiency so this motivates us to keep looking for additional approaches.

Are Compliance and Privacy Always at Odds?

Chris Soghoian points to an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal. It describes mounting pressure on the NSA to re-design its phone-data program---the program under which it compels telecommunications companies (telcos) like Verizon to turn over their phone record data. In the article, Timothy Edgar, a former privacy lawyer who served in the Bush and Obama administrations is quoted as saying: Privacy technology under development would allow for anonymous searches of databases, keeping data out of government hands but also preventing phone companies from learning the purpose of NSA searches.