Frequency-hiding dependency-preserving encryption for outsourced databases

The cloud paradigm enables users to outsource their data to computationally powerful third-party service providers for data management. Many data management tasks rely on the data dependency in the outsourced data. This raises an important issue of how the data owner can protect the sensitive information in the outsourced data while preserving the data dependency. In this paper, we consider functional dependency (FD), an important type of data dependency. Although simple deterministic encryption schemes can preserve FDs, they may be vulnerable against the frequency analysis attack. We design a frequency hiding, FD-preserving probabilistic encryption scheme, named F², that enables the service provider to discover the FDs from the encrypted dataset. We consider two attacks, namely the frequency analysis (FA) attack and the FD-preserving chosen plaintext attack (FCPA), and show that the F² encryption scheme can defend against both attacks with formal provable guarantee. Our empirical study demonstrates the efficiency and effectiveness of F², as well as its security against both FA and FCPA attacks.