Collusion defender : preserving subscribers’ privacy
in publish and subscribe systems

Cui, S; Belguith, S; De Alwis, P; Asghar, MR; Russello, G

Abstract

The Publish and Subscribe (pub/sub) system is an
established paradigm to disseminate the data from publishers
to subscribers in a loosely coupled manner using a network
of dedicated brokers. However, sensitive data could be exposed
to malicious entities if brokers get compromised or hacked; or
even worse, if brokers themselves are curious to learn about
the data. A viable mechanism to protect sensitive publications
and subscriptions is to encrypt the data before it is disseminated
through the brokers. State-of-the-art approaches allow brokers
to perform encrypted matching without revealing publications
and subscriptions. However, if malicious brokers collude with
malicious subscribers or publishers, they can learn the interests
of innocent subscribers, even when the interests are encrypted.

In this article, we present a pub/sub system that ensures
confidentiality of publications and subscriptions in the presence
of untrusted brokers. Furthermore, our solution resists collusion
attacks between untrusted brokers and malicious subscribers (or
publishers). Finally, we have implemented a prototype of our
solution to show its feasibility and efficiency.
Index Terms: Collusion Resistance, Secure Pub/sub, Subscribers’
Privacy, Publications’ Confidentiality

Citation

in publish and subscribe systems. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 18(3), 1051-1064. https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2019.2898827

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 3, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Feb 13, 2019
• Publication Date: May 13, 2021
• Deposit Date: Feb 4, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 4, 2019
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
• Print ISSN: 1545-5971
• Electronic ISSN: 1941-0018
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 1051-1064
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2019.2898827
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2019.2898827
• Related Public URLs: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=8858
• Additional Information: Additional Information : © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.