Database Padding for Dynamic Symmetric Searchable Encryption

Abstract

Dynamic symmetric searchable encryption (DSSE) that enables the search and update of encrypted databases outsourced to cloud servers has recently received widespread attention for leakage-abuse attacks against DSSE. In this paper, we propose a dynamic database padding method to mitigate the threat of data leakage during the update operation of outsourcing data. First, we introduce an outlier detection technology where bogus files are generated for padding according to the outlier factors, hiding the document information currently matching search keywords. Furthermore, we design a new index structure suitable for the padded database using the bitmap index to simplify the update operation of the encrypted index. Finally, we present an application scenario of the padding method and realize a forward and backward privacy DSSE scheme (named PDB-DSSE). The security analysis and simulation results show that our dynamic padding algorithm is suitable for DSSE scheme and PDB-DSSE scheme maintains the security and efficiency of the retrieval and update of the DSSE scheme.