Kimia Tajik (Oregon State University), Akshith Gunasekaran (Oregon State University), Rhea Dutta (Cornell University), Brandon Ellis (Oregon State University), Rakesh B. Bobba (Oregon State University), Mike Rosulek (Oregon State University), Charles V. Wright (Portland State University), Wu-Chi Feng (Portland State University)

In this paper, we motivate the need for image encryption techniques that preserve certain visual features in images and hide all other information, to balance privacy and usability in the context of cloud-based image storage services. In particular, we introduce the concept of ideal or exact Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption (TPE), a special case of format-preserving encryption, and present a concrete construction. In TPE, a ciphertext is itself an image that has the same thumbnail as the plaintext (unecrypted) image, but that provably leaks nothing about the plaintext beyond its thumbnail. We provide a formal security analysis for the construction, and a prototype implementation to demonstrate compatibility with existing services. We also study the ability of users to distinguish between thumbnail images preserved by TPE. Our findings indicate that TPE is an efficient and promising approach to balance usability and privacy concerns for images. Our code and a demo are available at: http://photoencryption.org.

View More Papers

MBeacon: Privacy-Preserving Beacons for DNA Methylation Data

Inken Hagestedt (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Yang Zhang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Mathias Humbert (Swiss Data Science Center, ETH Zurich/EPFL), Pascal Berrang (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Haixu Tang (Indiana University Bloomington), XiaoFeng Wang (Indiana University Bloomington), Michael Backes (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

Read More

Countering Malicious Processes with Process-DNS Association

Suphannee Sivakorn (Columbia University), Kangkook Jee (NEC Labs America), Yixin Sun (Princeton University), Lauri Korts-Pärn (Cyber Defense Institute), Zhichun Li (NEC Labs America), Cristian Lumezanu (NEC Labs America), Zhenyu Wu (NEC Labs America), Lu-An Tang (NEC Labs America), Ding Li (NEC Labs America)

Read More

We Value Your Privacy ... Now Take Some Cookies:...

Martin Degeling (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Christine Utz (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Christopher Lentzsch (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Henry Hosseini (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Florian Schaub (University of Michigan), Thorsten Holz (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

Read More

Statistical Privacy for Streaming Traffic

Xiaokuan Zhang (The Ohio State University), Jihun Hamm (The Ohio State University), Michael K. Reiter (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Yinqian Zhang (The Ohio State University)

Read More