# GraphSE$^2$: An Encrypted Graph Database for Privacy-Preserving Social Search

## TL;DR

GraphSE$^2$ is an encrypted graph database designed for privacy-preserving social search, enabling secure, scalable, and efficient queries on large social graphs while protecting user data.

## Contribution

It introduces an encrypted structural data model and query decomposition techniques for scalable, privacy-preserving social search in large-scale social networks.

## Key findings

- Supports social search queries on a million-user graph
- Achieves efficient parallel encrypted graph data access
- Demonstrates practicality on Azure Cloud with extensive evaluations

## Abstract

In this paper, we propose GraphSE$^2$, an encrypted graph database for online social network services to address massive data breaches. GraphSE$^2$ preserves the functionality of social search, a key enabler for quality social network services, where social search queries are conducted on a large-scale social graph and meanwhile perform set and computational operations on user-generated contents. To enable efficient privacy-preserving social search, GraphSE$^2$ provides an encrypted structural data model to facilitate parallel and encrypted graph data access. It is also designed to decompose complex social search queries into atomic operations and realise them via interchangeable protocols in a fast and scalable manner. We build GraphSE$^2$ with various queries supported in the Facebook graph search engine and implement a full-fledged prototype. Extensive evaluations on Azure Cloud demonstrate that GraphSE$^2$ is practical for querying a social graph with a million of users.