CAMsure

Abstract

We introduce CAMsure, the first realization of secure Content Addressable Memory (CAM) in the context of approximate search using near-neighbor algorithms. CAMsure provides a lightweight solution for practical secure (approximate) search with a minimal drop in the accuracy of the search results. CAM has traditionally been used as a hardware search engine that explores the entire memory in a single clock cycle. However, there has been little attention to the security of the data stored in CAM. Our approach stores distance-preserving hash embeddings within CAM to ensure data privacy. The hashing method provides data confidentiality while preserving similarity in the sense that a high resemblance in the data domain is translated to a small Hamming distance in the hash domain. Consequently, the objective of near-neighbor search is converted to approximate lookup table search which is compatible with the realizations of emerging content addressable memories. Our methodology delivers on average two orders of magnitude faster response time compared to RAM-based solutions that preserve the privacy of data owners.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Sep 27, 2017
Source ID
10.1145/3126547

Entities

People

  • Farinaz Koushanfar
  • M. Sadegh Riazi
  • Mohammad Samragh

Organizations

  • Office of Naval Research
  • University of California, San Diego

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Applied Combinatorial Optimization and Logic Circuit Design.
  • Cybersecurity.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.