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Who Is 1011011111\(\ldots \)1110110010? Automated Cryptanalysis of Bloom Filter Encryptions of Databases with Several Personal Identifiers

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Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2015)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 574))

Abstract

We provide the first efficient cryptanalysis of Bloom filter encryptions of a database containing more than one personal identifier. The cryptanalysis is fully automated and shows several drawbacks of existing encryption methods based on Bloom filters. In particular, the special representation of the hash functions as linear combinations of two hash functions f and g is exploited in order to detect Bloom filter encryptions of single bigrams (so-called atoms). The assignment of atoms to bigrams is obtained via a modification of an algorithm which was originally proposed for the automated cryptanalysis of simple substitution ciphers. Using our approach, we were able to reconstruct 77.7 % of the identifier values correctly. We point to further improvements of the basic Bloom filter approach that are worth being investigated with respect to their privacy guarantees in future work.

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Acknowledgements

Research of both authors was supported by the research grant SCHN 586/19-1 of the German Research Foundation (DFG) awarded to the head of the Research Methodology Group, Rainer Schnell. We thank him and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Methodology Group, University of Duisburg-Essen, Lotharstraße 65, 47057, Duisburg, Germany

    Martin Kroll & Simone Steinmetzer

Authors
  1. Martin Kroll
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  2. Simone Steinmetzer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martin Kroll .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Telecomunicações, Lisboa, Portugal

    Ana Fred

  2. New University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

    Hugo Gamboa

  3. FhP-AICOS, Porto, Portugal

    Dirk Elias

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Kroll, M., Steinmetzer, S. (2015). Who Is 1011011111\(\ldots \)1110110010? Automated Cryptanalysis of Bloom Filter Encryptions of Databases with Several Personal Identifiers. In: Fred, A., Gamboa, H., Elias, D. (eds) Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies. BIOSTEC 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 574. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27707-3_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27707-3_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27706-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27707-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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