Traditional cryptography techniques require our data to be unencrypted and to be processed correctly. This means that at some stage on a system we have no control over, our data will be processed in plain text. Solutions that allow the computation of arbitrary operations over data securely in the cloud are currently impractical. The holy grail of cryptography, fully homomorphic encryption, still requires minutes to compute a single operation. To provide a practical solution, this chapter proposes taking a different approach to the problem of securely processing data. This is achieved by each cloud service receiving an encoded part of the data, which is not enough to decode the plain-text value. The security strength is shifted from a computation problem to the sheer number possible options. Given the greater threat to data stored in the cloud is from insiders, this is the primary attack vector the presented schemes Bin Encoding and FRagmenting Individual Bits (FRIBs) aim to protect against.

Chapter Contents:

• Abstract
• 5.1 Introduction
• 5.2 Summary of distributed encoding and related work
• 5.2.1 Encoding
• 5.2.2 Distribution
• 5.2.3 Custom hardware processors
• 5.3 String searching
• 5.3.1 Overview
• 5.3.2 Removing special characters
• 5.3.3 Approximate string searching
• 5.3.4 False positives
• 5.3.5 Building the search index
• 5.3.6 Distributed index
• 5.3.7 Results for searching over a document
• 5.3.8 Summary
• 5.4 Arbitrary computation
• 5.4.1 Overview
• 5.4.2 Distributed NAND gate
• 5.4.2.1 Operation
• 5.4.2.2 Maintaining state
• 5.4.2.3 Reduction
• 5.4.3 Addition
• 5.4.4 Multiplication
• 5.4.5 Conditional
• 5.4.5.1 Secure results
• 5.4.5.2 Nonsecure results
• 5.4.6 Proof-of-concept addition and multiplication
• 5.5 Security analysis
• 5.5.1 One set of the distributed data
• 5.5.2 Breaking into all systems
• 5.6 Little computational and network overhead
• 5.7 Concluding remarks
• Acknowledgements
• References

Inspec keywords: data protection; cloud computing; private key cryptography

Other keywords: FRIB; cloud service; bin encoding; data protection; encoded data distribution; private processing; plain-text value; fragmenting individual bits; primary attack vector; secure data processing

Subjects: Data security; Internet software; Cryptography