Revisiting Searchable Encryption: New Improved Constructions and Research Challenges

Speaker:        Ioannis Demertzis
                University of Maryland

Title:          "Revisiting Searchable Encryption: New Improved
                 Constructions and Research Challenges"

Date:           Monday, 12 November 2018

Time:           4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue:          Lecture Theater F (near lifts 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

Searchable encryption (SE) allows a client to outsource a dataset to an
untrusted server while enabling the server to answer keyword queries in a
private manner. Since the first work by Song et al. in 2000, various
dimensions of the problem have been studied, such as security, dynamism
(supporting updates), parallelism, the size of the index, read efficiency
(the number of additional memory locations that the server reads per
result item), locality (the number of non-continues read that the search
algorithm performs) and expressiveness (allowing more expressive query
types, such as boolean, range queries etc.). Recently, scaling SE to big
data using external memory (HDD/SSD drives) became feasible, as new
schemes with low locality were proposed. In this talk we present our
following two works in this area; (i) the most efficient in practice
locality-aware SE (12x faster than in-memory and 577x faster than
in-external memory state-of-the-art SE schemes) (SIGMOD 2017) and (ii) our
recent linear-space SE scheme with constant locality and sublogarithmic
read efficiency (CRYPTO 2018). Finally, we present our own view on what
the future of research on SE could be by proposing new challenges and
research opportunities.


********************
Biography:

Ioannis Demertzis is a PhD student in the ECE department at the University
of Maryland working under the supervision of Prof. C. Papamanthou. Ioannis
received his ECE Diploma and M.Sc at the Technical University of Crete,
under the supervision of Professor M. Garofalakis. He is the recipient of
a Symantec Research Labs Graduate Fellowship, a Clark School of
Engineering Distinguished Graduate Fellowship, and a Limmat Stiftung Award
of Academic Excellence. Ioannis has been a research intern at the Crypto
Group of Visa Research, and the Research Labs of Symantec. His research
focus is on applied cryptography, cloud & database security, query
processing over encrypted data, searchable encryption, oblivious RAMs.