arXiv subjects

Marc Damie

Publications and source records attributed to Marc Damie.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

DDH-based schemes for multi-party Function Secret Sharing

Function Secret Sharing (FSS) schemes enable sharing efficiently secret functions. Schemes dedicated to point functions, referred to as Distributed Point Functions (DPFs), are the center of FSS literature thanks to their numerous applications including private information retrieval, anonymous communications, and machine learning. While two-party DPFs benefit from schemes with logarithmic key sizes, multi-party DPFs have seen limited advancements: $O(\sqrt{N})$ key sizes (with $N$, the function domain size) and/or exponential factors in the key size. We propose a DDH-based technique reducing the key size of existing multi-party schemes. In particular, we build an honest-majority DPF with $O(\sqrt[3]{N})$ key size. Our benchmark highlights key sizes up to $10\times$ smaller (on realistic problem sizes) than state-of-the-art schemes. Finally, we extend our technique to schemes supporting comparison functions.

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arXiv2026

TOSSS: a CVE-based Software Security Benchmark for Large Language Models

With their increasing capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are now used across many industries. They have become useful tools for software engineers and support a wide range of development tasks. As LLMs are increasingly used in software development workflows, a critical question arises: are LLMs good at software security? At the same time, organizations worldwide invest heavily in cybersecurity to reduce exposure to disruptive attacks. The integration of LLMs into software engineering workflows may introduce new vulnerabilities and weaken existing security efforts. We introduce TOSSS (Two-Option Secure Snippet Selection), a benchmark that measures the ability of LLMs to choose between secure and vulnerable code snippets. Existing security benchmarks for LLMs cover only a limited range of vulnerabilities. In contrast, TOSSS relies on the CVE database and provides an extensible framework that can integrate newly disclosed vulnerabilities over time. Our benchmark gives each model a security score between 0 and 1 based on its behavior; a score of 1 indicates that the model always selects the secure snippet, while a score of 0 indicates that it always selects the vulnerable one. We evaluate 14 widely used open-source and closed-source models on C/C++ and Java code and observe scores ranging from 0.48 to 0.89. LLM providers already publish many benchmark scores for their models, and TOSSS could become a complementary security-focused score to include in these reports.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Secure Sparse Matrix Multiplications and their Applications to Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning

To preserve data privacy, multi-party computation (MPC) enables executing Machine Learning (ML) algorithms on private data. However, MPC frameworks do not include optimized operations on sparse data. This absence makes them unsuitable for ML applications involving sparse data; e.g., recommender systems or genomics. Even in plaintext, such applications involve high-dimensional sparse data, that cannot be processed without sparsity-related optimizations due to prohibitively large memory requirements. Since matrix multiplication is a central building block of ML algorithms, our work proposes dedicated MPC algorithms to multiply secret-shared sparse matrices. Our sparse algorithms have several advantages over secure dense matrix multiplications (i.e., the classic multiplication). On the one hand, they avoid the memory issues caused by the "dense" data representation of dense multiplications. On the other hand, our algorithms can significantly reduce communication costs (up to $\times1000$) for realistic problem sizes. We validate our algorithms in two machine learning applications where dense matrix multiplications are impractical. Finally, we take inspiration from real-world sparse data properties to build 3 techniques minimizing the public knowledge necessary to secure sparse algorithms.

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arXiv2025

Eliminating Exponential Key Growth in PRG-Based Distributed Point Functions

Distributed Point Functions (DPFs) enable sharing secret point functions across multiple parties, supporting privacy-preserving technologies such as Private Information Retrieval, and anonymous communications. While 2-party PRG-based schemes with logarithmic key sizes have been known for a decade, extending these solutions to multi-party settings has proven challenging. In particular, PRG-based multi-party DPFs have historically struggled with practicality due to key sizes growing exponentially with the number of parties and the field size. Our work addresses this efficiency bottleneck by optimizing the PRG-based multi-party DPF scheme of Boyle et al. (EUROCRYPT'15). By leveraging the honest-majority assumption, we eliminate the exponential factor present in this scheme. Our construction is the first PRG-based multi-party DPF scheme with practical key sizes, and provides key up to 3x smaller than the best known multi-party DPF. This work demonstrates that with careful optimization, PRG-based multi-party DPFs can achieve practical performances, and even obtain top performances.

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arXiv2025

Energy Consumption of TLS, Searchable Encryption and Fully Homomorphic Encryption

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have attracted significant attention in response to privacy regulations, driving the development of applications that prioritize user data protection. At the same time, the information and communication technology (ICT) sector faces growing pressure to reduce its environmental footprint, particularly its energy consumption. While numerous studies have assessed the energy consumption of ICT applications, the environmental impact of cryptographic PETs remains largely unexplored. This work investigates this question by measuring the energy consumption increase induced by three PETs compared to their non-private counterparts: TLS, Searchable Encryption, and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). These technologies were chosen for two reasons. First, they cover different maturity levels -- from the widely deployed TLS protocol to the emerging FHE schemes -- allowing us to examine the influence of maturity on energy consumption. Second, they each have well-established applications in industry: web browsing, encrypted databases, and privacy-preserving machine learning. Our results reveal highly variable energy consumption increases, ranging from 2x for TLS to 10x for Searchable Encryption and 100,000x for FHE. Our experiments demonstrate a simple and reproducible methodology, based on existing open-source software, to quantify the energy costs of PETs. They also highlight the wide spectrum of energy demands across technologies, underscoring the importance of further research on sustainable PET design. Finally, we discuss orthogonal research directions, such as hardware acceleration, to outline promising directions toward sustainable PETs.

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arXiv2025

How to Securely Shuffle? A survey about Secure Shufflers for privacy-preserving computations

Ishai et al. (FOCS'06) introduced secure shuffling as an efficient building block for private data aggregation. Recently, the field of differential privacy has revived interest in secure shufflers by highlighting the privacy amplification they can provide in various computations. Although several works argue for the utility of secure shufflers, they often treat them as black boxes; overlooking the practical vulnerabilities and performance trade-offs of existing implementations. This leaves a central question open: what makes a good secure shuffler? This survey addresses that question by identifying, categorizing, and comparing 26 secure protocols that realize the necessary shuffling functionality. To enable a meaningful comparison, we adapt and unify existing security definitions into a consistent set of properties. We also present an overview of privacy-preserving technologies that rely on secure shufflers, offer practical guidelines for selecting appropriate protocols, and outline promising directions for future work.

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arXiv2025

Fedivertex: a Graph Dataset based on Decentralized Social Networks for Trustworthy Machine Learning

Decentralized machine learning - where each client keeps its own data locally and uses its own computational resources to collaboratively train a model by exchanging peer-to-peer messages - is increasingly popular, as it enables better scalability and control over the data. A major challenge in this setting is that learning dynamics depend on the topology of the communication graph, which motivates the use of real graph datasets for benchmarking decentralized algorithms. Unfortunately, existing graph datasets are largely limited to for-profit social networks crawled at a fixed point in time and often collected at the user scale, where links are heavily influenced by the platform and its recommendation algorithms. The Fediverse, which includes several free and open-source decentralized social media platforms such as Mastodon, Misskey, and Lemmy, offers an interesting real-world alternative. We introduce Fedivertex, a new dataset of 182 graphs, covering seven social networks from the Fediverse, crawled weekly over 14 weeks. We release the dataset along with a Python package to facilitate its use, and illustrate its utility on several tasks, including a new defederation task, which captures a process of link deletion observed on these networks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Revisiting the attacker's knowledge in inference attacks against Searchable Symmetric Encryption

Encrypted search schemes have been proposed to address growing privacy concerns. However, several leakage-abuse attacks have highlighted some security vulnerabilities. Recent attacks assumed an attacker's knowledge containing data ``similar'' to the indexed data. However, this vague assumption is barely discussed in literature: how likely is it for an attacker to obtain a "similar enough" data? Our paper provides novel statistical tools usable on any attack in this setting to analyze its sensitivity to data similarity. First, we introduce a mathematical model based on statistical estimators to analytically understand the attackers' knowledge and the notion of similarity. Second, we conceive statistical tools to model the influence of the similarity on the attack accuracy. We apply our tools on three existing attacks to answer questions such as: is similarity the only factor influencing accuracy of a given attack? Third, we show that the enforcement of a maximum index size can make the ``similar-data'' assumption harder to satisfy. In particular, we propose a statistical method to estimate an appropriate maximum size for a given attack and dataset. For the best known attack on the Enron dataset, a maximum index size of 200 guarantees (with high probability) the attack accuracy to be below 5%.

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arXiv2025

Evaluating Membership Inference Attacks in heterogeneous-data setups

Among all privacy attacks against Machine Learning (ML), membership inference attacks (MIA) attracted the most attention. In these attacks, the attacker is given an ML model and a data point, and they must infer whether the data point was used for training. The attacker also has an auxiliary dataset to tune their inference algorithm. Attack papers commonly simulate setups in which the attacker's and the target's datasets are sampled from the same distribution. This setting is convenient to perform experiments, but it rarely holds in practice. ML literature commonly starts with similar simplifying assumptions (i.e., "i.i.d." datasets), and later generalizes the results to support heterogeneous data distributions. Similarly, our work makes a first step in the generalization of the MIA evaluation to heterogeneous data. First, we design a metric to measure the heterogeneity between any pair of tabular data distributions. This metric provides a continuous scale to analyze the phenomenon. Second, we compare two methodologies to simulate a data heterogeneity between the target and the attacker. These setups provide opposite performances: 90% attack accuracy vs. 50% (i.e., random guessing). Our results show that the MIA accuracy depends on the experimental setup; and even if research on MIA considers heterogeneous data setups, we have no standardized baseline of how to simulate it. The lack of such a baseline for MIA experiments poses a significant challenge to risk assessments in real-world machine learning scenarios.

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arXiv2023

Passive Query-Recovery Attack Against Secure Conjunctive Keyword Search Schemes

While storing documents on the cloud can be attractive, the question remains whether cloud providers can be trusted with storing private documents. Even if trusted, data breaches are ubiquitous. To prevent information leakage one can store documents encrypted. If encrypted under traditional schemes, one loses the ability to perform simple operations over the documents, such as searching through them. Searchable encryption schemes were proposed allowing some search functionality while documents remain encrypted. Orthogonally, research is done to find attacks that exploit search and access pattern leakage that most efficient schemes have. One type of such an attack is the ability to recover plaintext queries. Passive query-recovery attacks on single-keyword search schemes have been proposed in literature, however, conjunctive keyword search has not been considered, although keyword searches with two or three keywords appear more frequently in online searches. We introduce a generic extension strategy for existing passive query-recovery attacks against single-keyword search schemes and explore its applicability for the attack presented by Damie et al. (USENIX Security '21). While the original attack achieves up to a recovery rate of 85% against single-keyword search schemes for an attacker without exact background knowledge, our experiments show that the generic extension to conjunctive queries comes with a significant performance decrease achieving recovery rates of at most 32%. Assuming a stronger attacker with partial knowledge of the indexed document set boosts the recovery rate to 85% for conjunctive keyword queries with two keywords and achieves similar recovery rates as previous attacks by Cash et al. (CCS '15) and Islam et al. (NDSS '12) in the same setting for single-keyword search schemes.

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arXiv2023

A Highly Accurate Query-Recovery Attack against Searchable Encryption using Non-Indexed Documents

Cloud data storage solutions offer customers cost-effective and reduced data management. While attractive, data security issues remain to be a core concern. Traditional encryption protects stored documents, but hinders simple functionalities such as keyword search. Therefore, searchable encryption schemes have been proposed to allow for the search on encrypted data. Efficient schemes leak at least the access pattern (the accessed documents per keyword search), which is known to be exploitable in query recovery attacks assuming the attacker has a significant amount of background knowledge on the stored documents. Existing attacks can only achieve decent results with strong adversary models (e.g. at least 20% of previously known documents or require additional knowledge such as on query frequencies) and they give no metric to evaluate the certainty of recovered queries. This hampers their practical utility and questions their relevance in the real-world. We propose a refined score attack which achieves query recovery rates of around 85% without requiring exact background knowledge on stored documents; a distributionally similar, but otherwise different (i.e., non-indexed), dataset suffices. The attack starts with very few known queries (around 10 known queries in our experiments over different datasets of varying size) and then iteratively recovers further queries with confidence scores by adding previously recovered queries that had high confidence scores to the set of known queries. Additional to high recovery rates, our approach yields interpretable results in terms of confidence scores.

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