TEFAR: An Efficient Transparent Finer-grained Encryption of Internet Access Artifacts

To combat the growing cybercrime, various jurisdictions have made regulatory policies for enterprises and service providers to collect and maintain Internet access artifacts. These artifacts contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII) violating the privacy rights of users. Encrypting all attributes of the artifacts to preserve privacy makes the artifacts unusable for doing security analytics to prevent cybercrime. Encrypting only necessary and sufficient attributes at fine granularity makes the artifacts analytically ready without compromising privacy rights. Existing fine-grained encryption methods are not efficient in terms of storage space and query execution time. In this paper, we propose TEFAR, an efficient transparent finer-grained encryption solution for privacy-preserving PII-sensitive attributes in the artifacts. From our evaluation, we found that the overheads in storage space and query time by the proposed solution are negligible (< 0.1%).