Threat Modeling of Cloud Based Implementation of Homomorphic Encryption
Threat Modeling of Cloud Based Implementation of Homomorphic Encryption
3, September 2020
Abstract
Outsourcing of data storage and data processing to cloud-based ser-
vice providers promises several advantages such as reduced maintenance
overhead, elastic performance, high availability, and security. Cloud ser-
vices offer a variety of functionalities for performing different operations
on the data. However, during the processing of data in cloud, security and
privacy may be compromised because of inadequate cryptographic imple-
mentation. Conventional encryption methods guarantee security during
transport (data-in-transit) and storage (data-at-rest), but cannot prevent
data leak during an operation on the data (data-in-use). Modern homo-
morphic encryption methods promise to solve this problem by applying
different operations on encrypted data without knowing or deciphering
the data. Cloud-based implementation of homomorphic cryptography has
seen significant development in the recent past. However, data security,
even with implemented homomorphic cryptography, is still dependant on
the users and the application owners. This exposes the risk of introducing
new attack surfaces. In this paper, we introduce a novel and one of the
early attempts to model such new attack surfaces on the implementation
of homomorphic encryption and map them to STRIDE threat model [1]
which is proliferously used in the industry.
1 Introduction
Modern cloud services enable efficient computations on various data sets in the
form of Platform or Software-as-a-Service. Data processing and Data analysis
become easy and reliable due to elastic high-performance hardware used by
cloud service providers (CSP). Recent data trends suggest [2] that there is an
exponential increase in the growth rate of data creation. Often, this data is
DOI:10.5121/ijcis.2020.10302 19
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an encrypted string, finds an encrypted list of relevant pages without even know-
ing the actual search string, and response. User can decrypt the response and
see the list. The service provider can never know the actual search-string and
the responses, but it still can provide the service seamlessly. Detail explanation
of homomorphic encryption (HE) is discussed in the subsequent sections.
Microsoft’s Azure Confidential Computing introduced in 2019 [9], followed
by Google’s confidential cloud [10], launched as a beta release in July, 2020, are
the first commercial implementations of homomorphic encryption. Other cloud
providers including are also extensively researching the technology to make their
cloud resilient to data-breaches.
HE has been called the ”Swiss Army knife of cryptography” as it is a one-stop
shop solution that can be applied consistently across variety of cryptographic
implementations. It is often believed to be a silver bullet for most of the prob-
lems plaguing the industry today, in terms of protection of Sensitive Personal
Data or Information (SPDI) from third-party cloud providers [11]. However,
challenges persist wherein the insecure implementation and inadequate security
controls around HE could compromise the data and negate the whole purpose of
using HE as a solution to protect SPDI from cloud vendors or third party data
processors. HE, as a cryptosystem, is resilient to data breaches and attacks on
privacy. But, the success of protecting the confidentiality, integrity, and avail-
ability (CIA) depends largely on the implementation and design of the system.
Threat modeling is a well-accepted formal approach to find relevant threats
or attack surfaces of the designed system. To identify these potential threats
and possible attacks early in the life cycle of software product development,
we could employ STRIDE based threat modeling [1] as an effective tool dur-
ing the product design phase. Although thorough cryptanalysis would uncover
these attacks or threats, it is a long drawn process and requires a high level of
expertise. Hence, as a quick alternative for a rigorous cryptanalysis approach,
a threat modeling methodology and tools can be adopted to identify threats
and address them through appropriate mitigation techniques for a secure HE
implementation.
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Research Objective
As mentioned in the abstract, cloud-based implementation of homomorphic
cryptography has seen significant development in the recent past. However,
data security, even with implemented homomorphic cryptography, is still de-
pendent on the users and the application owners. This exposes the risk of
introducing new attack surfaces. In this paper, we introduce a novel and one of
the early attempts to model such new attack surfaces on the implementation of
homomorphic encryption and map them to Microsoft STRIDE threat model [1]
which is proliferously used in the industry
Scope
The scope of the research is to identify threats using Microsoft STRIDE model
in a cloud based homomorphic encryption implementation early in the product
design phase and to plan the adoption of mitigations stated in the paper for the
identified threats.
Limitations:
The limitation of the paper is that it does not delve deep into cryptanalysis
although that is one of the right approaches to find weaknesses in cryptographic
algorithms. As cryptanalysis is a time consuming activity, Threat Modeling
of a HE system is suggested as a quicker alternative to identify threats and
mitigations.
2 Background
HE is very different from other forms of cryptographic algorithms such as regular
symmetric and asymmetric algorithms in a way that it can do computing on
encrypted data and provide result of the computation as an encrypted output.
This capability of HE is a game changer as it can now preserve the privacy or
confidential data of an individual or corporates by not using plaintext data for
processing.
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cryptanalysis
We’ll describe the protocol in steps, starting with a simplified version that is
not secure and tweaking it as we go along to ensure security.
Security
This protocol is obviously not sound. We change it by having the verifier toss
a coin b ←R {0, 1} in Step 3. If b = 1 then the verifier proceeds as before. If
b = 0 then the verifier sends Ee (b) to the prover. The verifier checks in Step 4
that b = d.
Soundness
We can now prove soundness of the new protocol though we will need a strength-
ening of the homomorphic encryption scheme, we require that it is possible to
efficiently test that a public key e is in the range of the generation algorithm
and a ciphertext â is in the range of the encryption algorithm. This can be
fixed by adding another check by the verifier, though we’ll defer details to the
exercise.
Step 4 The prover only sends a commitment to d (for example f (x), r, hx, ri⊕d,
where f is a one-way permutation).
Step 5 Verifier sends all randomness it used in producing the ciphertext of Step
3. The prover verifies this is indeed the case, and otherwise aborts.
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Step 6 The prover sends d and also the randomness used in producing the
commitment.
This can be shown to preserve soundness, since soundness held even for
computationally unbounded provers, and the commitment scheme is perfectly
binding.
2.4 Need of HE
In the new age of regulatory compliances and the paramount importance placed
on privacy of individuals across and within nations, it is an imperative need to
protect SPDI from everyone except the data owner. The only person who needs
to have access to the data should be the data owner and not even to the data
processor or any third party processing or administering unit or individuals.
This is a paradox as protecting SPDI from a data processor, be it cloud or
third party on premise vendor, is hard as data needs to be decrypted prior to
processing and decrypted data in the memory is accessible for the cloud provider,
if he wishes to see. Hence, HE is a perfect solution to address the mentioned
paradox and a timely technological intervention without which the only way to
address the case was through legal and contractual obligations between the data
owner and the data processor.
2.5 Types of HE
Now having seen the what and why of HE, we explain different types of HE
in vogue today. The categories of HE are based on the number of mathemat-
ical computations that can be performed on the encrypted text. The major
differences in terms of capability, is tabulated in table 1.
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3 Attacks on a HE implementation
After introducing the conceptual background of HE we introduce different types
of threats or attacks that could be possible on Cloud based or non-cloud based
HE implementations [14].
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5 Conclusion
In this paper, we introduced a novel approach for doing threat modeling for
cloud-based implementation of homomorphic encryption. We translate the
cryptanalysis based attack models into STRIDE threat model which is easy
to understand by the practitioners. The present state of art in the domain is
still very immature. We are in process of building a framework based on this
approach, which is included as our future scope of work. This work should help
the developers ar architects to build in-depth security implementation of homo-
morphic security in an effective and efficient way and without understanding
the detail mathematical background of this cryptanalysis.
References
[1] A. Shostack, “Experiences threat modeling at microsoft.” MODSEC MoD-
ELS, vol. 2008, 2008.
[2] S. He, G. Manns, J. Saunders, W. Wang, L. Pollock, and M. L. Soffa, “A
statistics-based performance testing methodology for cloud applications,”
in Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software
Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software
Engineering, 2019, pp. 188–199.
[3] C. Wang, K. Ren, W. Lou, and J. Li, “Toward publicly auditable secure
cloud data storage services,” IEEE network, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 19–24, 2010.
[4] M. E. Hellman, “An overview of public key cryptography,” IEEE Commu-
nications Magazine, vol. 40, no. 5, pp. 42–49, 2002.
[5] C. Gentry, “A fully homomorphic encryption scheme,” Ph.D. dissertation,
Sanford Univeristy, 2009.
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