Authors:
Khazam Alhamdan
;
Tassos Dimitriou
and
Imtiaz Ahmad
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Engineering, Kuwait University and Kuwait
Keyword(s):
SAT, Outsourcing Computations, Obfuscation, Data Privacy, Attack, Cloud Computing.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Data and Application Security and Privacy
;
Information and Systems Security
;
Information Assurance
;
Information Hiding
;
Privacy
;
Privacy Enhancing Technologies
;
Security and Privacy in IT Outsourcing
;
Security and Privacy in the Cloud
Abstract:
The emergence of cloud computing gave users the capability to offload computations that cannot be executed locally to cloud servers with large computational power. One such computationally demanding problem is solving large satisfiability (SAT) instances. Although many problems from AI, circuit verification, etc. can be converted to SAT, outsourcing SAT instances may leak considerable information that can put a user’s security at risk. Hence the privacy of outsourcing computations to the cloud is a major issue. In this work we look at the techniques of Qin et al. (Qin and Jia., 2014; Qin and Du., 2018) which have been used to obfuscate SAT formulas before they are released to the cloud. We came up with a realistic attack against their technique that demonstrates how a malicious cloud provider can obtain significant information about the underlying SAT instance. Our work shows that ad hoc schemes cannot offer the required security guarantees for outsourcing SAT computations, hence mor
e formal frameworks should be used instead.
(More)