For Security Innovation, Anurag Khandelwal Wins Usenix Award

For his work on a system that efficiently prevents hackers from obtaining sensitive information, Anurag Khandelwal was awarded the Distinguished Paper Award at the 29th USENIX Security Symposium. 

Khandelwal, assistant professor of computer science, received the award for his work in developing Pancake, a system that could advance the field of secure storage systems. It was designed as a solution to a common problem. 

“When you offer your data to the cloud, you can encrypt it so that people don’t know what’s inside the data,” Khandelwal said. However, hackers can still observe how often you access each of the data items, including sensitive information such as medical records. By looking at the access patterns, they can correlate it with other types of information. For instance, by knowing that diabetes is a disease three times as common as cancer, an adversary can compare that information to the user’s access patterns and conclude with high probability that a patient has a certain illness.  

Some security systems try to foil these types of attacks by creating additional accesses to the data to confuse hackers. This approach, though, takes a significant toll on the computer system’s performance. With the Pancake system, Khandelwal and his team created a system that tracks the frequency of how the data is accessed, and then distributes it equally to disguise the specifics that would give hackers crucial information. This proved significantly more efficient than systems that add data accesses.  

“We were able to reduce the overhead significantly by using this approach where you smooth the frequency of access across all these data items,” he said.

Khandelwal said he and his collaborators plan to continue pursuing the various research directions of the work.