Blind custodians: A database service architecture that supports privacy without encryption

Abstract

We describe an architecture for a database service that does not assume that the service provider can be trusted. Unlike other architectures that address this problem, this architecture, which we call blind custodians, does not rely on encryption. Instead, it offers confidentiality by means of information dissociation: The server only stores "fragments" of information that are considered safe (i.e., each fragment does not violate privacy), while the client stores the associations between the fragments that are necessary to reconstruct the information. We argue that this architecture allows satisfactory confidentiality, while offering two important advantages: (1) It does not restrict the types of queries that can be submitted by clients (as encryption-based methods invariably do), and (2) it requires only light processing at the client, assigning the bulk of the processing to the server (as befits a true service). Moreover, the architecture permits flexible control over the level of confidentiality that should be maintained (at the cost of additional overhead). © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.