Supporting secure dynamic alert zones using searchable encryption and graph embedding

Sina Shaham, Gabriel Ghinita*, Cyrus Shahabi

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Location-based alerts have gained increasing popularity in recent years, whether in the context of healthcare (e.g., COVID-19 contact tracing), marketing (e.g., location-based advertising), or public safety. However, serious privacy concerns arise when location data are used in clear in the process. Several solutions employ searchable encryption (SE) to achieve secure alerts directly on encrypted locations. While doing so preserves privacy, the performance overhead incurred is high. We focus on a prominent SE technique in the public-key setting–hidden vector encryption, and propose a graph embedding technique to encode location data in a way that significantly boosts the performance of processing on ciphertexts. We show that the optimal encoding is NP-hard, and we provide three heuristics that obtain significant performance gains: gray optimizer, multi-seed gray optimizer and scaled gray optimizer. Furthermore, we investigate the more challenging case of dynamic alert zones, where the area of interest changes over time. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that our solutions can significantly improve computational overhead compared to existing baselines.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)185-206
Number of pages22
JournalVLDB Journal
Volume33
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2024

Keywords

  • Graph embedding
  • Hidden vector encryption
  • Secure alert zones

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