Structural Leakage in Graph Encryption: Attacks and Defenses

2026-08-14

AI Summary

This study addresses structural leakage vulnerabilities in single-pair shortest path queries over encrypted graphs by proposing the Fragment Tree attack to expose risks and introducing BlindGES as a defense mechanism. BlindGES innovatively integrates heavy-light decomposition, canonical fragment encoding, and a two-level multi-map index with a merging partition strategy to effectively mitigate side-channel inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed attack accurately recovers 10.24% of query content, whereas BlindGES reduces one-to-one mapping leakage to below 20% and path length leakage to under 1%. Furthermore, BlindGES halves setup time and decreases storage overhead by 32%, significantly enhancing both the security and efficiency of encrypted graph queries.

Abstract

Graph encryption schemes (GES) enable secure outsourcing of graph data while supporting efficient queries. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of structural leakage in GES for single-pair shortest path (SPSP) queries, integrating findings from two recent works. First, we analyze PathGES, a scheme designed to resist query recovery attacks through heavy-light decomposition (HLD) and canonical fragment encoding. Our analysis reveals that PathGES suffers from significant imbalances in HLD decomposition, with over 99% of token-path mappings being one-to-one on real-world datasets, enabling both the Falzon-Paterson attack and side-channel inference of path lengths. Second, we present Fragment Tree attack that exploits these structural weaknesses to recover query contents, achieving up to 10.24% exact recovery on sparse graphs. Third, we introduce BlindGES, an enhanced scheme incorporating a Merge-and-Divide mechanism and two-level multimap index that reduces one-to-one mappings to below 20%, cuts setup time by 50%, reduces storage overhead by 32%, and limits path length leakage to under 1%. This report systematically presents attack methodologies, defense mechanisms, security proofs, and experimental evaluations on seven real-world datasets.

Problem

• Graph Encryption
• Structural Leakage
• Single-Pair Shortest Path
• Query Recovery Attack

Innovation

• Graph Encryption
• Structural Leakage
• Fragment Tree Attack
• BlindGES
• Merge-and-Divide