Big Data Analytics over Encrypted Datasets with Seabed

Today, enterprises collect large amounts of data and leverage the cloud to perform analytics over this data. Since the data is often sensitive, enterprises would prefer to keep it confidential and to hide it even from the cloud operator. Systems such as CryptDB and Monomi can accomplish this by operating mostly on encrypted data; however, these systems rely on expensive cryptographic techniques that limit performance in true “big data” scenarios that involve terabytes of data, or more.

This paper presents Seabed, a system that enables efficient analytics over large encrypted data sets. In contrast to previous systems, which rely on asymmetric encryption schemes, Seabed uses a novel, additively symmetric homomorphic encryption scheme (ASHE) to perform large-scale aggregations efficiently. Additionally, Seabed introduces a novel randomized encryption scheme called Splayed ASHE or SPLASHE that can, in certain cases, prevent frequency attacks based on auxiliary data.