This is my first IEEE publication, co-authored with Professor Hiroshi Fujinoki. The problem: if you encrypt search queries but an adversary can observe the ciphertext traffic, how many queries do they need before a frequency attack succeeds?
We used the Moving Average Bootstrap (MAB) method to estimate that threshold. The idea is that encrypted search leaks frequency information (how often each ciphertext appears), and an adversary can correlate those frequencies against known plaintext distributions. The bootstrap lets us estimate confidence intervals on the number of observations needed without closed-form solutions.
This came out of my MS thesis work on encrypted search at SIU. The core question (how much does encrypted search actually leak?) turns out to be harder than it sounds, because the answer depends on the plaintext distribution, the query distribution, and how patient the adversary is. The bootstrap approach gives us a way to answer it empirically.
For more related work, see my research page and publications.
