Order-Preserving Symmetric Encryption

  • Authors:
  • Alexandra Boldyreva;Nathan Chenette;Younho Lee;Adam O'Neill

  • Affiliations:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

  • Venue:
  • EUROCRYPT '09 Proceedings of the 28th Annual International Conference on Advances in Cryptology: the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

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.