William E. Skeith

Bio: William E. Skeith is an academic researcher from City College of New York. The author has contributed to research in topics: Encryption & Private information retrieval. The author has an hindex of 10, co-authored 22 publications receiving 734 citations. Previous affiliations of William E. Skeith include The Graduate Center, CUNY & City University of New York.

Public Key Encryption that Allows PIR Queries.

Abstract: Consider the following problem: Alice wishes to maintain her email using a storageprovider Bob (such as a Yahoo! or hotmail e-mail account). This storage-provider should provide for Alice the ability to collect, retrieve, search and delete emails but, at the same time, should learn neither the content of messages sent from the senders to Alice (with Bob as an intermediary), nor the search criteria used by Alice. A trivial solution is that messages will be sent to Bob in encrypted form and Alice, whenever she wants to search for some message, will ask Bob to send her a copy of the entire database of encrypted emails. This however is highly inefficient. We will be interested in solutions that are communication-efficient and, at the same time, respect the privacy of Alice. In this paper, we show how to create a publickey encryption scheme for Alice that allows PIR searching over encrypted documents. Our solution provides a theoretical solution to an open problem posed by Boneh, DiCrescenzo, Ostrovsky and Persiano on “Public-key Encryption with Keyword Search”, providing the first scheme that does not reveal any partial information regarding user’s search (including the access pattern) in the public-key setting and with non-trivially small communication complexity. The main technique of our solution also allows for Single-Database PIR writing with sublinear communication complexity, which we consider of independent interest.

Private Searching on Streaming Data

Abstract: In this paper we consider the problem of private searching on streaming data, where we can efficiently implement searching for documents that satisfy a secret criteria (such as the presence or absence of a hidden combination of hidden keywords) under various cryptographic assumptions. Our results can be viewed in a variety of ways: as a generalization of the notion of private information retrieval (to more general queries and to a streaming environment); as positive results on privacy-preserving datamining; and as a delegation of hidden program computation to other machines.

Private searching on streaming data

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the problem of private searching on streaming data. We show that in this model we can efficiently implement searching for documents under a secret criteria (such as presence or absence of a hidden combination of hidden keywords) under various cryptographic assumptions. Our results can be viewed in a variety of ways: as a generalization of the notion of a Private Information Retrieval (to the more general queries and to a streaming environment as well as to public-key program obfuscation); as positive results on privacy-preserving datamining; and as a delegation of hidden program computation to other machines.

A Survey of Single Database PIR: Techniques and Applications.

Abstract: In this paper we survey the notion of Single-Database Private Information Retrieval (PIR). The first Single-Database PIR was constructed in 1997 by Kushilevitz and Ostrovsky and since then Single-Database PIR has emerged as an important cryptographic primitive. For example, Single-Database PIR turned out to be intimately connected to collision-resistant hash functions, oblivious transfer and public-key encryptions with additional properties. In this survey, we give an overview of many of the constructions for Single-Database PIR (including an abstract construction based upon homomorphic encryption) and describe some of the connections of PIR to other primitives.

Homomorphic Secret Sharing from Paillier Encryption

Abstract: A recent breakthrough by Boyle et al. [7] demonstrated secure function evaluation protocols for branching programs, where the communication complexity is sublinear in the size of the circuit (indeed just linear in the size of the inputs, and polynomial in the security parameter). Their result is based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption (DDH), using (variants of) the ElGamal cryptosystem. In this work, we extend their result to show a construction based on the circular security of the Paillier encryption scheme. We also offer a few optimizations to the scheme, including an alternative to the “Las Vegas”-style share conversion protocols of [7, 9] which directly checks the correctness of the computation. This allows us to reduce the number of required repetitions to achieve a desired overall error bound by a constant fraction for typical cases, and for large programs, reduces the total computation cost.

The knowledge complexity of interactive proof-systems

Abstract: Usually, a proof of a theorem contains more knowledge than the mere fact that the theorem is true. For instance, to prove that a graph is Hamiltonian it suffices to exhibit a Hamiltonian tour in it; however, this seems to contain more knowledge than the single bit Hamiltonian/non-Hamiltonian.In this paper a computational complexity theory of the “knowledge” contained in a proof is developed. Zero-knowledge proofs are defined as those proofs that convey no additional knowledge other than the correctness of the proposition in question. Examples of zero-knowledge proof systems are given for the languages of quadratic residuosity and 'quadratic nonresiduosity. These are the first examples of zero-knowledge proofs for languages not known to be efficiently recognizable.

Searchable symmetric encryption: improved definitions and efficient constructions

Abstract: Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) allows a party to outsource the storage of its data to another party (a server) in a private manner, while maintaining the ability to selectively search over it. This problem has been the focus of active research in recent years. In this paper we show two solutions to SSE that simultaneously enjoy the following properties: Both solutions are more efficient than all previous constant-round schemes. In particular, the work performed by the server per returned document is constant as opposed to linear in the size of the data. Both solutions enjoy stronger security guarantees than previous constant-round schemes. In fact, we point out subtle but serious problems with previous notions of security for SSE, and show how to design constructions which avoid these pitfalls. Further, our second solution also achieves what we call adaptive SSE security, where queries to the server can be chosen adaptively (by the adversary) during the execution of the search; this notion is both important in practice and has not been previously considered.Surprisingly, despite being more secure and more efficient, our SSE schemes are remarkably simple. We consider the simplicity of both solutions as an important step towards the deployment of SSE technologies.As an additional contribution, we also consider multi-user SSE. All prior work on SSE studied the setting where only the owner of the data is capable of submitting search queries. We consider the natural extension where an arbitrary group of parties other than the owner can submit search queries. We formally define SSE in the multi-user setting, and present an efficient construction that achieves better performance than simply using access control mechanisms.

Cryptographic cloud storage

Abstract: We consider the problem of building a secure cloud storage service on top of a public cloud infrastructure where the service provider is not completely trusted by the customer We describe, at a high level, several architectures that combine recent and non-standard cryptographic primitives in order to achieve our goal We survey the benefits such an architecture would provide to both customers and service providers and give an overview of recent advances in cryptography motivated specifically by cloud storage

Conjunctive, subset, and range queries on encrypted data

Abstract: We construct public-key systems that support comparison queries (x ≥ a) on encrypted data as well as more general queries such as subset queries (x∈ S). Furthermore, these systems support arbitrary conjunctive queries (P1 ∧ ... ∧ Pl) without leaking information on individual conjuncts. We present a general framework for constructing and analyzing public-key systems supporting queries on encrypted data.

Conjunctive, Subset, and Range Queries on Encrypted Data.

Abstract: We construct public-key systems that support comparison queries (x ≥ a) on encrypted data as well as more general queries such as subset queries (x ∈ S). These systems support arbitrary conjunctive queries (P1∧· · ·∧P`) without leaking information on individual conjuncts. In addition, we present a general framework for constructing and analyzing public-key systems supporting queries on encrypted data.