Mitacs and Solana Networks Inc have approved funding of the research project “Homomorphically Encrypted FSM” at $33.75K.
Finite State Machine (FSM) is an essential part of any Intrusion Detection System. FSM is typically used to detect binary sequences that can represent virus signatures and traffic rules. In this project, we are working on an Oblivious Intrusion Detection System (Oblivious-IDS) which can work in cloud setting under a non-trusted system administrator with honest-but-curious adversarial model. A trusted server is responsible for designing the Oblivious-IDS using tools from Homomorphic Encryption libraries, while a cloud system administrator should be able to run the IDS without being able to know virus signatures and traffic rules that are being used. Since FSM is an essential part of any modern IDS, a homomorphically encrypted version of the FSM is required.
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is used to enable regular mathematical operations on encrypted data. The typical convection is that HE is used to protect the data, but not the circuit. Since FSM is essentially a circuit that was designed to detect data pattern, the circuit itself is not directly protected by HE. In this project, we will propose and study different methodologies to enable the design of secure, homomorphically encrypted FSM.