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  4. Reducing Metadata Leakage from Encrypted Files and Communication with PURBs
 
conference paper

Reducing Metadata Leakage from Encrypted Files and Communication with PURBs

Nikitin, Kirill  
•
Barman, Ludovic  
•
Lueks, Wouter  
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2019
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PoPETS)
19th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS)

Most encrypted data formats leak metadata via their plaintext headers, such as format version, encryption schemes used, number of recipients who can decrypt the data, and even the recipients’ identities. This leakage can pose security and privacy risks to users, e.g., by revealing the full membership of a group of collaborators from a single encrypted e-mail, or by enabling an eavesdropper to fingerprint the precise encryption software version and configuration the sender used. We propose that future encrypted data formats improve security and privacy hygiene by producing Padded Uniform Random Blobs or PURBs: ciphertexts indistinguishable from random bit strings to anyone without a decryption key. A PURB’s content leaks nothing at all, even the application that created it, and is padded such that even its length leaks as little as possible. Encoding and decoding ciphertexts with no cleartext markers presents efficiency challenges, however. We present cryptographically agile encodings enabling legitimate recipients to decrypt a PURB efficiently, even when encrypted for any number of recipients’ public keys and/or passwords, and when these public keys are from different cryptographic suites. PURBs employ Padmé, a novel padding scheme that limits information leakage via ciphertexts of maximum length M to a practical optimum of O(log log M) bits, comparable to padding to a power of two, but with lower overhead of at most 12% and decreasing with larger payloads.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.2478/popets-2019-0056
Author(s)
Nikitin, Kirill  
Barman, Ludovic  
Lueks, Wouter  
Underwood, Matthew Joshua  
Hubaux, Jean-Pierre  
Ford, Bryan Alexander  
Date Issued

2019

Publisher

Sciendo

Published in
Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PoPETS)
Total of pages

25

Series title/Series vol.

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETS); 2019:4

Volume

2019

Issue

4

Start page

6

End page

33

Subjects

Metadata

•

Leakage

•

Padding

•

Traffic analysis

URL

Implementation

https://github.com/dedis/purb
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DEDIS  
SPRING  
LDS  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
19th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS)

Stockholm, Sweden

July 16–20, 2019

Available on Infoscience
November 4, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/162683
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