Secure Computation on Encrypted Data

In recent years, there have been numerous data breaches where sensitive data has been leaked. Global data privacy and protection legislation is still poorly enforced, creating confusion and misinterpretation. As well as this, data security and data privacy are two of the most commonly cited issues with cloud computing. There is a fear amongst some that cloud service providers (CSPs) exploit customer data for their own means, such as sharing customer data with third parties. To alleviate these fears, cloud service providers have introduced support for data encryption. Whilst encryption is synonymous with data security, the matter in which it is utilised by cloud service providers fails to offer complete security.

Used in its traditional form, encryption guarantees the security of data-in-transit and data-at-rest. However, it must be decrypted once received or retrieved from storage to allow any type of computation to be performed on it. To retain the ability to process encrypted customer data, cloud service providers require access to the associated decryption keys. Such keys can be stored on the premises of the cloud service provider or forwarded there by the customer as and when they require access to their data. Whilst this approach goes some way towards addressing the data security and privacy fears associated with the cloud, it is not considered truly secure by virtue of the fact that customers must disclose their decryption keys.

As an application of cryptography, Searchable Encryption schemes are designed to be secure against an adversarial model and with a technical environment in mind. Legacy-Compliant Searchable Encryption schemes can be utilised with traditional relational database management systems (RDBMSs), which use structured query language (SQL)—a type of programming designed to retrieve specific information from databases. Ultimately, if a cloud service is breached and the data are encrypted, individuals or companies are the only ones who retain the private key to unlock the data. Having data encrypted in the cloud, yet as still searchable and updatable, is one path to preventing future data breaches.

Searchable Symmetric Encryption will be an essential tool for many individuals and organisations—especially in a time where the majority of us are relying on technology more than ever before. We can expect to see the continuation of this as technology advances, to prevent data breaches from becoming even more of a threat. This issue is a call for papers in the area of computation or search over encrypted data.

Prof. Dr. Kevin Curran
Guest Editor

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• encryption
• searchable symmetric encryption
• homomorphic computing
• cloud security