Inspecting End-to-End Encrypted Communication Differentially for the Efficient Identification of Harmful Media

Tengfei Zheng, Tongqing Zhou, Kai Lu, Zhiping Cai

Abstract: Due to the immense benefits of guaranteeing user privacy, popular messaging platforms have shown enthusiasm for deploying End-to-End Encryption (E2EE). However, E2EE could be misused for bypassing media moderation, opening a shortcut for the viral spreading of harmful media. Private hash-matching techniques are proposed to identify harmful content in E2EE. Unfortunately, the pioneering solution incurs prohibitively high latency due to redundant user-cloud interactions for a private inspection. In this paper, we design Entbergen for efficient inspection of E2EE media by differentially handling harmless and harmful ingredients. For this, a novel Private-2D BloOm filter with Fuzzy Query (PBO-FQ) is designed for local, agile, and private media hash matching. It is proposed as the first structure that adapts inverted index and differential privacy (DP) towards seamless integration of sketch and mask encoding. With PBO-FQ, Entbergen can instantly filter out harmless media and only pays attention to the small-scale counterparts by scrutinizing them privately based on homomorphic encryption. Security analysis shows that Entbergen can effectively fulfil the desired privacy requirements. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Entbergen is sufficiently efficient (w.r.t. computation and communication overhead) for working on mobile devices and can easily scale to real-world inspection with a large database.