Seny Kamara, PhD candidate, Johns Hopkins University

"Searchable Symmetric Encryption: Improved Definitiions and Efficient Constructions"

Thursday, February 21, 4:00 PM

Maginnes Hall Room 102

Reception prior to talk in Packard Lab lobby at 3:30 PM

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 limitations, 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.

Further, prior work on SSE only considered the setting where only the owner of the data is capable of submitting search queries. We consider the natural extension where an arbitrary group of parties other than the owner can submit search queries. We formally define SSE in this multi-user  setting, and present an efficient construction.

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

Bio: Seny Kamara is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science  at Johns Hopkins University. He received his B.Sc. degree in Computer  Science from Purdue University. His research interests include cryptography, biometrics and network security. He is a recipient of  the Bell Labs Graduate Research Fellowship  and the Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering Phillips and Camille Bradford Fellowship.