IACR News item: 05 November 2012
Alexandra Boldyreva, Nathan Chenette, Younho Lee, Adam O\'Neill
ePrint Report
We initiate the cryptographic study of order-preserving symmetric encryption (OPE), a primitive suggested in the database community by Agrawal et al.~(SIGMOD \'04) for allowing efficient range queries on encrypted data. Interestingly, we first show that a straightforward relaxation of standard security notions for encryption such as indistinguishability against chosen-plaintext attack (IND-CPA) is unachievable by a practical OPE scheme. Instead, we propose a security notion in the spirit of pseudorandom functions (PRFs) and related primitives asking that an OPE scheme look ``as-random-as-possible\" subject to the order-preserving constraint.
We then design an efficient OPE scheme and prove its security under our notion based on pseudorandomness of an underlying blockcipher. Our construction is based on a natural relation we uncover between a random order-preserving function and the hypergeometric probability distribution.
In particular, it makes black-box use of an efficient sampling algorithm for the latter.
Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.