A Metaphone based Chaotic Searchable Encryption Algorithm for
Border Management
Abir Awad
1,2
and Brian Lee
1
1
Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce (IC4), Athlone Institut of Technology, Athlone, Ireland
2
Facuty of Computing, Engineering and Science, University of South Wales, Pontypridd, U.K.
Keywords: Privacy, Personal Data, Searchable Encryption, Fuzzy Search, Chaotic Locality Sensitive Hashing,
Metaphone.
Abstract: In this paper, we consider a use case for national border control and management involving the assurance of
privacy and protection of personally identifiable information (PII) in a shared multi-tenant environment, i.e.
the cloud. A fuzzy searchable encryption scheme is applied on a watch list of names which are used as indexes
for the identification files that are in their turn encrypted and stored on the cloud. Two propositions are
described and tested in this paper. The first entails the application of a chaotic fuzzy searchable encryption
scheme directly on the use case and its subsequent verification on a number of phonetics synonyms for each
name. In the second version, a metaphone based chaotic fuzzy transformation method is used to perform a
secure search and query. In this latter case, the fuzzy transformation is performed in two stages: the first stage
is the application of the metaphone algorithm which maps all the words pronounced in the same way to a
single code and the second stage is the application of the chaotic Local Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to the code
words. In both the first and second propositions, amplification of the LSH is also performed which permits
controlled fuzziness and ranking of the results. Extensive tests are performed and experimental results show
that the proposed scheme can be used for secure searchable identification files and a privacy preserving
scheme on the cloud.
1 INTRODUCTION
Privacy–respecting fuzzy matching is a key
requirement in many applications e.g. public health,
biomedical research, border control management etc.
(Hoepman, 2006) - (Bissessar et al., 2016). Matching
words and names that sound similar is important for
border security and for many other applications.
However, outsourced personal information and
identity files to the cloud or any shared domain need
also to be secured/encrypted.
A border management text based “watchlist”
search would also need to cater for Phonetic String
Matching which is a kind of non-exact (fuzzy) text
searching requirements.
This should cover the following type of errors:
• Phonetic equivalent spelling variants: e.g. Alain,
Alan, Allain, Allan, Allen, Allin, Allyn.
• Transliteration spelling differences (e.g. from
Arabic to Latin script): e.g. Muammar Gadafi,
Moamar Gaddafi, Mo'ammar Gadhafi,
Muammar Gathafi, Muammar Ghadafi.
In this paper, we propose to use the adapted
version of the chaotic fuzzy searchable encryption
proposed in (Awad et al., 2015) for this use case.
Searchable encryption is a scheme that allows to
search over encrypted files by the device of
keywords. In this approach the keyword, or index, is
the name of the person that will indicate his full
identity file which is stored on the cloud in an
encrypted format. Recently, many approaches have
been proposed to enable fuzzy search. Wildcards
were used for similar keywords search (Li et al.,
2010). However, this technique only covers part of
the possibly nearby keywords (Yang et al., 2014).
Other fuzzy search approaches using the locality
sensitive hashing (LSH) were also proposed recently
for secure storage and search on the cloud (Bringer
and Chabanne, 2011), (Kuzu et al., 2012), (Awad et
al., 2014). In (Awad et al., 2015), we proposed a
chaotic searchable encryption for a secure cloud
storage. This method was proposed for a mobile cloud
storage use case scenario for secure storage and
retrieval of content based text files. In this paper, we
Awad, A. and Lee, B.
A Metaphone based Chaotic Searchable Encryption Algorithm for Border Management.
DOI: 10.5220/0005953503970402
In Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE 2016) - Volume 4: SECRYPT, pages 397-402
ISBN: 978-989-758-196-0
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
397
apply two modified versions of this algorithm for the
border management use case. In our new scenario,
there is no need for a posting list or for order
preserving encryption. Each keyword is, in this case,
the name of each person and is used as a reference to
one identity file. When querying with a slightly
erroneous name, the algorithm retrieves the best
matched names and ranks them using the similarity of
the stored fuzzy transformation values and return
these results, names and identity files, to the requester
(border management) who can perform any further
investigation, if needed, to find out if the person
crossing the border is on the watch list or not.
This paper is organised as follows: Sections 2
gives some background information. Section 3 and 4
describes respectively the proposed and tested chaos
based searchable encryption algorithms with and
without the metaphone matching transformation.
Section 5 presents the test bed and the simulation
results. Finally, Section 6 summarizes our
conclusions.
2 BACKGROUND
2.1 Locality Sensitive Hashing
LSH functions reduce with high probability the
differences occurring between similar data i.e. similar
results are obtained for data with close proximity but
distant data remain remote.
Let B be a metric space,
,r
∈ℝ with
<r
and p
,p
∈
0,1
with p
>p
A family H=h
,…,h
is an LSH family if for
allx,x
∈B:
Pr
h
x
=h
x′
>p
,ifd
x,x′
<
(1)
Pr
h
x
=h
x′
<p
,ifd
x,x′
>
(2)
is the distance metric utilized (e.g. Hamming
distance).
Jaccard coefficient is usually used to measure the
similarity between two sets and containing words
from two documents (Awad et al., 2015). It is defined
in (3) as follows:
s
A,B
=
|
⋂
|
|
⋃
|
(3)
The distance between these sets can be obtained
by (4) as follows:
d
A,B
=1−s
A,B
(4)
Min-hash or Min wise independent permutations
is one of the most used LSH functions. If π is a
random permutation, the hash value is defined by (5)
as follows:
h
A
=min
π
a
∕a∈A
(5)
and the probability that the two hashed values are
equal, is equal to the Jaccard distance (6):
Pr
h
A
=h
B
=s
A,B
(6)
In our proposal, min-hash is used to support the
fuzzy transformation applied on the names indexing
the outsourced files.
2.2 Amplified Minhash Methods
To amplify a locality-sensitive hashing family a
AND-OR construction can be used (Kuzu et al.,
2012).
The AND construction is formed with random
functions from H: g
=h
Λh
,…Λh
. In this
context, g
x
=g
y
if and only if ∀jh
x
=
h
y
where 1≤j≤k. The OR construction is
formed with λ different AND constructions such that
g
x
=g
y
if and only if ∃ig
x
=g
y
where
1≤i≤λ. With such a construction, we can turn an
r
,r
,p
,p
sensitive family into an
r
,r
,p′
,p′
sensitive family where p′
=1−
1−p
and p′
=1−1−p
.
Amplified LSH is used in our proposal to improve
the results of the fuzzy transformation step of our
searchable encryption algorithms.
2.3 Chaotic Minhash Methods
Chaos has a number of interesting properties, e.g.
good pseudo-randomness and sensitivity to its control
parameters that can be directly linked to the
properties of confusion and diffusion in
cryptography. In addition, these systems are
deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is
fully determined by their parameters, with no random
elements involved. However, the chaotic signal is
pseudo-random and may appear as noise for
unauthorized users. The idea of taking advantage of
digital chaotic systems and of constructing chaotic
cryptosystems has been extensively investigated and
attracted many researchers (Awad, 2010) – (Rostom
et al., 2014) but very few researchers considered
using the chaos for searchable encryption. In (Awad
et al., 2015), we proposed new minhash methods
based on Piece Wise Linear Chaotic Map (PWLCM).
SECRYPT 2016 - International Conference on Security and Cryptography
398
In this method, the translation i.e. the encoding of the
keyword, is performed by the chaotic map instead of
the Bloom filter used by Kuzu et al. (Kuzu et al.,
2012). PWLCM is then used to transform the
keyword to a set of numbers that will be used as input
for the minwise permutation method in order to
obtain finally the minhash value.
A 1-gram shingling is applied on each name and
the ASCII code of each letter is mapped to the interval
[0,1] and then encoded by the chaotic map. For each
shingle, a number of iterations are performed and the
obtained chaotic values are then mapped to integers
in the interval [0,m], where m is a secret parameter for
the minhash. Finally, the keyword is represented by
an array of values that are used as an input for the
minhash method. The amplified chaotic minhashes
are finally obtained by applying the amplification
method i.e. the AND-OR construction on each one in
addition with chaos.
The amplified chaotic minhash is used in the
fuzzy transformation stage of our proposed
searchable encryption algorithms.
2.4 Metaphone
A phonetic algorithm is an algorithm to identify
words with similar pronunciation and is used to index
the words based on their pronunciation. The first
metaphone or a phonetic algorithm was published by
Lawrence Philips (Lawrence, 1990) in 1990 and it
was used for indexing words by their English
pronunciation. A new version of the algorithm, which
is named Double Metaphone (Lawrence, 2000) is
later produced and it did take into account spelling
peculiarities of a number of other languages in
addition to the English e.g.
French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese… In 2009,
Lawrence Philips released a third version, called
Metaphone 3, which achieves an accuracy of
approximately 99% for English words, non-English
words familiar to Americans, and first names and
family names commonly found in the United States.
All these algorithms were basically built to discover
similar pronunced names stored in large databases
(Parmar and Kumbharana, 2014). These algorithms
are slightly different but a metaphone algorithm
usually operates by first removing non-English letters
and characters from the word being processed. Next,
all vowels are also discarded unless the word begins
with an initial vowel in which case all vowels except
the initial one are discarded. Finally all consonants
and groups of consonants are mapped to their
Metaphone code.
The phonetic algorithm is used to improve the
fuzziness in our proposed metaphone based
searchable encryption algorithm.
3 SEARCHABLE ENCRYPTION
ALGORITHM
The proposed approach allows to search over
encrypted identity files stored in the cloud and returns
the relevant files to the queries in a ranked order.
This
scheme permits search not only with the exact index
name used during the cloud storage process, but also
with an approximate keyword i.e. a misspelling name.
It consists of two different phases: the storage
phase and the search phase. In the storage phase, the
border management creates, from the watch list
names, the meta-data necessary for the cloud provider
to search the full identity files of these people. Then,
they encrypt these files and store them in the shared
environment i.e. the cloud. In the search phase, when
a person is trying to cross the border, the responsible
person on the border control queries the cloud to find
out whether this person is on the watch list or not. The
cloud receives the hashed query, performs the search,
retrieves and returns the matched identity files in a
ranked order based on their similarity to the query.
We give below the detailed description for the both
processes.
3.1 Storage Phase
Figure 1: Storage of the names and identities on the cloud.
This phase consists, basically, of two parts (see Fig. 1);
the fuzzy transformation of the names i.e. keywords and
the encryption of the actual identity files. The obtained
index and encrypted files are then stored in the cloud.
We used AES for the encryption of the identity files and
the amplified chaotic local sensitive hashing
explained in section 2 for the fuzzy transformation.
A Metaphone based Chaotic Searchable Encryption Algorithm for Border Management
399
3.2 Search Phase
During this process, the responsible on the border
control needs to perform the fuzzy transformation on
the name of the suspected person and query the cloud
with it. In its turn, the cloud uses this index (hashed
name) to retrieve the most relevant files for this
name/query (see Fig. 2).
We assume that the user is querying with a
slightly different name than the stored one. In our test,
we consider that the user is querying by one of the
phonetic synonyms of the original name or by a
misspelling name. Then the secure search scheme is
applied on this erroneous name and the query is sent
to the cloud. This later searches over the stored data
and return the identities of the most similar names to
the query which will be then decrypted on his side. In
our algorithm, the user can specify the maximum
number of identity files that he wants to receive from
the cloud.
Figure 2: Search with the phonetic synonyms on the cloud
to find the identity files.
4 METAPHONE BASED
SEARCHABLE ENCRYPTION
In this section, we explain the second proposed
searchable encryption algorithm for the border
management. This algorithm is using an improved
fuzzy transformation by applying the amplified
chaotic LSH on the code obtained by the metaphone
algorithm and not directly on the actual name as
performed in the algorithm explained earlier in
section 3.
4.1 Storage Phase
The double fuzzy transformation is applied on each
name and then the index is then sent to the cloud
along with the encrypted (using AES) identity file.
The cloud provider then stores this information into a
hashmap using the secure index (encrypted name) as
a reference for the corresponding encrypted identity
files. The fuzzy transformation in this case is a
combination of the metaphone algorithm and the
amplified local sensitive hashing (see Fig. 3).
Figure 3: Storage of the names and identities on the cloud
for the metaphone based searchable encryption.
4.2 Search Phase
Similar to the search phase of the previous searchable
encryption algorithm we assume that the border
control person is querying by the exact name or by
one of the phonetic synonyms of the original name or
by a mispelled name. The same metaphone algorithm
followed by the amplified chaotic LSH are applied on
this keyword. The cloud then uses this index to
retrieve the most relevant ID files (see Fig. 4).
Figure 4: Search with the phonetic synonyms on the cloud
to find the identity file.
5 EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
All of our programs are written in Java. To apply the
algorithm on the identities use-case, a test-bed needed
Metaphone
algorithm
I
w
+
AES
Amplified
LSH
w
I
w
Morgan
Mariken
Morgana
Morganica
Morganne
Morganstein
Morgun
Metaphone
algorithm
Amplified
LSH
SECRYPT 2016 - International Conference on Security and Cryptography
400
to be prepared. A list of 100 distinct (fake) names are
used in our test and a metaphone file which contains
the phonetic synonyms for each name is created.
Finally, the two proposed versions of the fuzzy
searchable encryption are applied on these synonyms
to prove the efficiency of the proposed methods.
5.1 Testbed Preparation
5.1.1 Generation of a List of Fake Names
We generated a list of names using a fake name
generator (fakenamegenerator, 2016). This generator
is first used to generate a file containing 100 fake
identities then these names and the corresponding
identities are inserted into different files for testing
purpose. We avoided the repetition of names in the
created list which means that each name appears once
in the list to be tested.
5.1.2 Generation of Phonetic Synonyms
In this section, we explain how to generate the
phonetic synonyms for each of the names for testing
purpose i.e. to query with erroneous/similar names.
To generate the phonetics synonyms for each name,
we did follow the following procedure which
consisted on two stages: pre-computation and
phonetics hashmap creation.
Pre-computation
The goal of this phase is to create a "metaphone
hashmap" where a user can query with a metaphone
code and find all the words which might have similar
pronunciation.
Fig. 5 shows how this hashmap is created.
Figure 5: Metaphone hashmap creation.
A word list of names is taken from the "Moby
Words" project (
Moby Words, 2016
) which is a
collection of public-domain lexical resources created
by Grady Ward in 1996. The used list contains the
most common 21986 names in the United States and
Great Britain. The metaphone algorithm is then
applied on these names and a hashmap is then created.
Each metaphone code is then a reference to a number
of names which we called the phonetics synonyms.
Test Phonetics Synonyms Generation Phase
As shown in Fig. 6, to find the list of words that might
have a similar pronunciation for each of our test
names, we applied the metaphone algorithm, found
the metaphone code and queried with it on the
metaphone hashmap (computed in the pre-
computation phase) to find the phonetic synonyms for
each test name. Then, a metaphone file containing the
phonetics synonyms is created for each name and is
then used for the testing of our algorithms. This size
of this file varied from a name to another depending
on the number of phonetic synonyms found in the
metaphone hashmap.
Figure 6: Phonetics synonyms generation.
5.2 Test Results
In order to test our proposed approaches, we queried
with each phonetic synonym, generated earlier for
testing purpose, and we calculated the percentage of
success of retrieving the right identity file for each
name. Then, we calculated the average for the 100
names.
In the first test, we assumed that the user is
receiving just one identity file from the cloud. The
obtained average of success over the 100 names is
equal to 0.793 for the first version of the searchable
encryption method and 0.99 for the metaphone based
searchable encryption. As we can see, the metaphone
based searchable encryption method is more
successful in retrieving the required identity file,
Metaphone
algorithm
Hash map
creation
cod
e
name
Metaphon
e
Hashmap
A Metaphone based Chaotic Searchable Encryption Algorithm for Border Management
401
when querying with a misspelling name, comparing
to the original chaotic searchable encryption method.
The same test is then performed when the user did
require the most similar three identity files for his
query and the results for the first and second
algorithms are then calculated. The averages over the
100 names for the first and second algorithms are
respectively equal to 0.796 and 1. As we can see, the
algorithms are more successful, in this case, to find
the right identity files when querying with a
misspelling name. The main reason is that the cloud
provider is retrieving three files and not just one and
then there is a bigger chance to find the matched
identity file.
6 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we proposed the first combined chaos and
metaphone based searchable encryption approach. The
proposed algorithm allows fuzzy keyword searches
over the encrypted data stored on the cloud. Our
approach proved the possibility of the usage of the
searchable encryption on the identity storage use case
and guarantees the privacy and confidentiality of the
people crossing borders even vis-à-vis the cloud
provider who is semi-trusted in our case.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is made within the framework of the Irish
Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce (IC4)
which is an Irish government and Enterprise Ireland
supported technology research centre established in
2012.
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