PROPYLA: Privacy Preserving Long-Term Secure Storage

TL;DR

PROPYLA introduces a novel long-term secure storage system that ensures data integrity, confidentiality, and access pattern hiding over decades or centuries, addressing limitations of previous cryptographic architectures.

Contribution

It is the first architecture to simultaneously provide long-term integrity, confidentiality, and access pattern hiding security for sensitive data storage.

Findings

Feasible long-term security with combined cryptographic techniques.

Achieves access pattern hiding alongside data confidentiality.

Performance analysis confirms practicality of the approach.

Abstract

An increasing amount of sensitive information today is stored electronically and a substantial part of this information (e.g., health records, tax data, legal documents) must be retained over long time periods (e.g., several decades or even centuries). When sensitive data is stored, then integrity and confidentiality must be protected to ensure reliability and privacy. Commonly used cryptographic schemes, however, are not designed for protecting data over such long time periods. Recently, the first storage architecture combining long-term integrity with long-term confidentiality protection was proposed (AsiaCCS'17). However, the architecture only deals with a simplified storage scenario where parts of the stored data cannot be accessed and verified individually. If this is allowed, however, not only the data content itself, but also the access pattern to the data (i.e., the information which data items are accessed at which times) may be sensitive information. Here we present the first long-term secure storage architecture that provides long-term access pattern hiding security in addition to long-term integrity and long-term confidentiality protection. To achieve this, we combine information-theoretic secret sharing, renewable timestamps, and renewable commitments with an information-theoretic oblivious random access machine. Our performance analysis of the proposed architecture shows that achieving long-term integrity, confidentiality, and access pattern hiding security is feasible.