Leakage Inversion: Towards Quantifying Privacy in Searchable Encryption

Searchable encryption (SE) provides cryptographic guarantees that a user can efficiently search over encrypted data while only disclosing patterns about the data, also known as leakage. Recently, the community has developed leakage-abuse attacks that shed light on what an attacker can infer about the underlying sensitive information using the aforementioned leakage. A glaring missing piece in this effort is the absence of a systematic and rigorous method that quantifies the privacy guarantees of SE.