Dynamic Searchable Encryption (DSE) has emerged as a solution to efficiently handle and protect large-scale data storage in encrypted databases (EDBs). Volume leakage poses a significant threat, as it enables adversaries to reconstruct search queries and potentially compromise the security and privacy of data. Padding strategies are common countermeasures for the leakage, but they significantly increase storage and communication costs. In this work, we develop a new perspective on handling volume leakage. We start with distinct search and further explore a new concept called distinct DSE (d-DSE). We also define new security notions, in particular Distinct with Volume-Hiding security, as well as forward and backward privacy, for the new concept. Based on d-DSE, we construct the d-DSE designed EDB with related constructions for distinct keyword (d-KW-dDSE), keyword (KW-dDSE), and join queries (JOIN-dDSE) and update queries in encrypted databases. We instantiate a concrete scheme BF-SRE, employing Symmetric Revocable Encryption. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets, such as Crime, Wikipedia, and Enron, for performance evaluation. The results demonstrate that our scheme is practical in data search and with comparable computational performance to the SOTA DSE scheme (MITRA*, AURA) and padding strategies (SEAL, ShieldDB). Furthermore, our proposal sharply reduces the communication cost as compared to padding strategies, with roughly 6.36 to 53.14x advantage for search queries.

Searchable symmetric encryption schemes often unintentionally disclose certain sensitive information, such as access, volume, and search patterns. Attackers can exploit such leakages and other available knowledge related to the user's database to recover queries. We find that the effectiveness of query recovery attacks depends on the volume/frequency distribution of keywords. Queries containing keywords with high volumes/frequencies are more susceptible to recovery, even when countermeasures are implemented. Attackers can also effectively leverage these “special” queries to recover all others. By exploiting the above finding, we propose a Jigsaw attack that begins by accurately identifying and recovering those distinctive queries. Leveraging the volume, frequency, and co-occurrence information, our attack achieves 90% accuracy in three tested datasets, which is comparable to previous attacks (Oya et al., USENIX' 22 and Damie et al., USENIX' 21). With the same runtime, our attack demonstrates an advantage over the attack proposed by Oya et al (approximately 15% more accuracy when the keyword universe size is 15k). Furthermore, our proposed attack outperforms existing attacks against widely studied countermeasures, achieving roughly 60% and 85% accuracy against the padding and the obfuscation, respectively. In this context, with a large keyword universe (≥3k), it surpasses current state-of-the-art attacks by more than 20%.

Searchable symmetric encryption enables private queries over an encrypted database, but it can also result in information leakages. Adversaries can exploit these leakages to launch injection attacks (Zhang et al., USENIX Security’16) to recover the underlying keywords from queries. The performance of the existing injection attacks is strongly dependent on the amount of leaked information or injection. In this work, we propose two new injection attacks, namely BVA and BVMA, by leveraging a binary volumetric approach. We enable adversaries to inject fewer files than the existing volumetric attacks by using the known keywords and reveal the queries by observing the volume of the query results. Our attacks can thwart well-studied defenses (e.g., threshold countermeasure, padding) without exploiting the distribution of target queries and client databases. We evaluate the proposed attacks empirically in real-world datasets with practical queries. The results show that our attacks can obtain a high recovery rate (> 80%) in the best-case scenario and a roughly 60% recovery even under a large-scale dataset with a small number of injections (< 20 files).