Order-preserving symmetric encryption

Alexandra Boldyreva, Nathan Chenette, Younho Lee, Adam O'Neill

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

691 Scopus citations

Abstract

We initiate the cryptographic study of order-preserving symmetric encryption (OPE), a primitive suggested in the database community by Agrawal et al. (SIGMOD '04) for allowing efficient range queries on encrypted data. Interestingly, we first show that a straightforward relaxation of standard security notions for encryption such as indistinguishability against chosen-plaintext attack (IND-CPA) is unachievable by a practical OPE scheme. Instead, we propose a security notion in the spirit of pseudorandom functions (PRFs) and related primitives asking that an OPE scheme look "as-random-as-possible" subject to the orderpreserving constraint. We then design an efficient OPE scheme and prove its security under our notion based on pseudorandomness of an underlying blockcipher. Our construction is based on a natural relation we uncover between a random order-preserving function and the hypergeometric probability distribution. In particular, it makes black-box use of an efficient sampling algorithm for the latter.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 2009 - 28th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Proceedings
Pages224-241
Number of pages18
DOIs
StatePublished - 2009
Event28th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, EUROCRYPT 2009 - Cologne, Germany
Duration: 26 Apr 200930 Apr 2009

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume5479 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference28th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, EUROCRYPT 2009
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityCologne
Period26/04/0930/04/09

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