Interactive message-locked encryption and secure deduplication

Abstract

This paper considers the problem of secure storage of outsourced data in a way that permits deduplication. We are for the first time able to provide privacy for messages that are both correlated and dependent on the public system parameters. The new ingredient that makes this possible is interaction. We extend the message-locked encryption (MLE) primitive of prior work to interactive message-locked encryption (iMLE) where upload and download are protocols. Our scheme, providing security for messages that are not only correlated but allowed to depend on the public system parameters, is in the standard model. We explain that interaction is not an extra assumption in practice because full, existing deduplication systems are already interactive.