[{"key":"dc.contributor.author","value":"Chiu, Joshua","language":null},{"key":"dc.date.accessioned","value":"2026-04-14T17:18:13Z","language":null},{"key":"dc.date.available","value":"2026-04-14T17:18:13Z","language":null},{"key":"dc.date.issued","value":"2026","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.identifier.uri","value":"http:\/\/hdl.handle.net\/2429\/94028","language":null},{"key":"dc.description.abstract","value":"Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) enables keyword search over encrypted data, but practical schemes leak structured information during query execution. Leakage-abuse attacks exploit this information, yet their reported effectiveness depends heavily on assumptions about the attacker\u2019s auxiliary knowledge, the client\u2019s query behaviour, and the types of queries being issued. We examine how realistic current assumptions are and how they shape privacy conclusions.\r\n\r\nWe find that LLM-generated documents are not a viable substitute for real auxiliary corpora to enhance leakage-abuse attacks because they fail to preserve the keyword distributions of domain-specific data. Real point-query traces exhibit temporal dependence and are better captured by a first-order Markov process, although temporal drift limits how well that dependence transfers across time which limits attack effectiveness in practical scenarios. Conjunctive queries expose a substantially stronger attack surface when dependence between keywords is modelled. Taken together, these results show that the apparent privacy of SSE is highly sensitive to the realism of the evaluation setup, and that credible privacy claims therefore require empirically grounded assumptions rather than idealized attack models.","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.language.iso","value":"eng","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.publisher","value":"University of British Columbia","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.rights","value":"Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International","language":"*"},{"key":"dc.rights.uri","value":"http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc-nd\/4.0\/","language":"*"},{"key":"dc.title","value":"Towards realistic assumptions in searchable symmetric encryption","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.type","value":"Text","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.degree.name","value":"Master of Applied Science - MASc","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.degree.discipline","value":"Electrical and Computer Engineering","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.degree.grantor","value":"University of British Columbia","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.contributor.supervisor","value":"Oya, Simon","language":null},{"key":"dc.contributor.supervisor","value":"Gopalakrishnan, Sathish","language":null},{"key":"dc.date.graduation","value":"2026-05","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.type.text","value":"Thesis\/Dissertation","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.description.affiliation","value":"Applied Science, Faculty of","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.description.affiliation","value":"Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.degree.campus","value":"UBCV","language":"en"},{"key":"dc.description.scholarlevel","value":"Graduate","language":"en"}]