Range search on encrypted spatial data with dynamic updates 1

Abstract

Driven by the cloud-first initiative taken by various governments and companies, it has become a common practice to outsource spatial data to cloud servers for a wide range of applications such as location-based services and geographic information systems. Searchable encryption is a common practice for outsourcing spatial data which enables search over encrypted data by sacrificing the full security via leaking some information about the queries to the server. However, these inherent leakages could equip the server to learn beyond what is considered in the scheme, in the worst-case allowing it to reconstruct of the database. Recently, a novel form of database reconstruction attack against such kind of outsourced spatial data was introduced (Markatou and Tamassia, IACR ePrint 2020/284), which is performed using common leakages of searchable encryption schemes, i.e., access and search pattern leakages. An access pattern leakage is utilized to achieve an order reconstruction attack, whereas both access and search pattern leakages are exploited for the full database reconstruction attack. In this paper, we propose two novel schemes for outsourcing encrypted spatial data supporting dynamic range search. Our proposed schemes leverage R⁺tree to partition the dataset and binary secret sharing to support secure range search. They further provide backward and content privacy and do not leak the access pattern, therefore being resilient against the above mentioned database reconstruction attacks. The evaluations and results on the real-world dataset demonstrate the practicality of our schemes, due to (a) the minimal round-trip between the client and server, and (b) the low computation and storage overhead on the client side.