Blinded Searching a Secret Split Archive

Appeared in MSST 2014.

Abstract

Secret splitting across independent sites has been proposed for data storage in archival systems as an approach that removes the issues surrounding key management resulting from fixed key encryption. However, the inherent security of such an archive normally precludes it from being directly searched; as a result, applications for secret split archives have been limited in the general environment. In this paper, we present a novel method to perform blinded searching of a secret-split archive. We leverage pre-indexing, keyed hashing and Bloom filters to enable searching: blinding the data custodian from knowing what terms are being queried. The addition of chaff during file ingestion prevents targeted theft, while a probabilistic index scheme aids in reconstruction, thereby mitigating the false positives due to chaff as well as those inherent in Bloom filters.

Publication date:
March 2014

Authors:
Joel Frank
Thomas Kroeger
Ethan L. Miller

Projects:
Archival Storage

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{percival-ff95e8e,
  author       = {Joel Frank and Thomas Kroeger and Ethan L. Miller},
  title        = {Blinded Searching a Secret Split Archive},
  booktitle    = {MSST 2014},
  month        = mar,
  year         = {2014},
}