Trusted CI Webinar: Privacy Preserving Aggregate Range Queries on Encrypted Multi-dimensional Databases, Monday November 11th @10am Central

Augusta University's Hoda Maleki presenting the talk, Privacy Preserving Aggregate Range Queries on Encrypted Multi-dimensional Databases, on November 18th at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

Data-driven collaborations often involve sharing large-scale datasets in cloud environments, where adversaries may exploit server vulnerabilities to access sensitive information. Traditional approaches, such as Trusted Execution Environments, lack the scalability for parallel processing, while techniques like homomorphic encryption incur prohibitive computational overheads. ARMOR addresses these limitations by developing encrypted querying techniques that support a variety of scientific data types and queries, balancing efficiency with privacy. The project’s interdisciplinary team focuses on advancing encryption methods, improving query performance for multidimensional data, and rigorously evaluating security risks and overheads under real-world scenarios.

A recent research under ARMOR is the development of Secure Standard Aggregate Queries (SSAQ), a novel approach for secure aggregation on multidimensional sparse datasets stored on untrusted servers. Aggregation functions like SUM, AVG, COUNT, MIN, MAX, and STD are essential for scientific data analysis but pose privacy risks when performed on encrypted data. Existing methods using searchable encryption suffer from access pattern and volume leakage and are often limited to one-dimensional settings. SSAQ overcomes these challenges by employing d-dimensional segment trees to precompute responses for all possible query ranges, thus improving the efficiency of secure range queries.

To further reduce leakage, SSAQ integrates Oblivious RAM (ORAM) to conceal data access patterns during query execution. This combination ensures a higher level of security, making SSAQ suitable for complex scientific data scenarios where sensitive information needs to be safeguarded. The approach significantly extends the applicability of searchable encryption techniques, offering a scalable and efficient solution for secure data analytics in cloud environments while minimizing privacy risks.

Speaker Bio: 

Dr. Hoda Maleki is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer and Cyber Sciences at Augusta University, specializing in system security, applied cryptography, and blockchain technology. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Connecticut. Dr. Maleki's research addresses critical security challenges, including IoT security, secure data retrieval in encrypted databases, and privacy-preserving data access in cloud environments. Her work leverages the Universally Composable (UC) security framework to analyze complex systems and employs multi-dimensional searchable encryption to protect massive scientific datasets. With over $1 million in NSF funding, her research advances scalable, efficient cryptographic solutions that meet the security needs of modern data-driven applications.

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Announcing the Publication of v2 of the Trusted CI OT Procurement Matrix & Companion Guide

Last year, the Secure by Design team announced the publication of the first version of the Trusted CI OT (Operational Technology) Procurement Matrix. After gathering feedback from maritime operational technology practitioners and some of their vendors, we have published an updated version of the Matrix and a companion Guide to further assist the OT community.  

The Guide can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13743314

The purpose of the Matrix is to assist those in leadership roles during the procurement process. It’s meant to help formulate questions for vendors to discuss security controls on devices that will be used for maritime research. The Matrix includes a list of controls, requirements for the control, potential questions for vendors, tips, and real world examples justifying a given control.    

The updates to v2 of the Matrix includes columns for ISO/IEC 27000 family and the ISA/IEC 62443 Series of Standards.

The updated version of the Matrix can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13830599

We have already seen positive impacts from this document. “Even at our project stage of construction, where a majority of OT procurements are complete and fulfilled, we find the OT Vendor Procurement Matrix to continue to be useful," Christopher Romsos, Datapresence Systems Engineer for the Regional Class Research Vessel (RCRV) said. "Despite having contracts in place and work well underway at the time the matrix was published, we realized that the OT Vendor Procurement Matrix could be leveraged as a discovery tool to inform our Cyber Risk Management Planning needs. We're in a more informed position now for our CRMP activities because the matrix provided us with something we could easily use in the field and that was designed to assess cyber risk in OT systems,” he said.

The Secure by Design team will be moderating a panel for in-person attendees later this week at the NSF Cybersecurity Summit. The Matrix will surely come up as a discussion topic.

Cybersecurity Center of Excellence Receives Five-Year, $6M/Year Award From NSF

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, a five-year, $6-million per-year award to run through September 2029. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will now serve as Trusted CI’s central steward.

Trusted CI empowers trustworthy discovery and innovation funded by NSF by partnering with cyberinfrastructure (CI) operators to build and maintain effective cybersecurity programs that secure the progress of NSF-funded research. The center started in 2012 and consists of a multi-institutional, cross-functional team that addresses the complex challenges facing the NSF’s cyberinfrastructure research ecosystem. 

Read more in the press release.

To learn more about the Trusted CI Framework, the NSF Cybersecurity Summit, regional Summits, and Trusted CI’s other activities and resources, please read this expanded announcement and learn more on expanded announcement.