Outsourcing SAT-based Verification Computations in Network Security

2025-05-22

AI Summary

Outsourcing SAT verification computations in cloud environments poses significant data leakage risks. Method: This paper proposes a privacy-preserving SAT instance randomization technique that jointly employs variable remapping, customized perturbations based on Min-Cost SAT and MAX-3SAT, structural Boolean formula transformations, and constraint perturbation—all designed to obscure the solution space while preserving semantic equivalence and solution-space topology. A formal correctness proof and an experimental evaluation framework are established. Contribution/Results: Experiments on real-world network configuration analysis demonstrate zero information leakage under standard adversarial assumptions, while maintaining solver efficiency. The method exhibits strong generality, scalability, and practical deployability across diverse SAT-based verification scenarios.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability
• Machine Learning: Privacy
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

The emergence of cloud computing gives huge impact on large computations. Cloud computing platforms offer servers with large computation power to be available for customers. These servers can be used efficiently to solve problems that are complex by nature, for example, satisfiability (SAT) problems. Many practical problems can be converted to SAT, for example, circuit verification and network configuration analysis. However, outsourcing SAT instances to the servers may cause data leakage that can jeopardize system's security. Before outsourcing the SAT instance, one needs to hide the input information. One way to preserve privacy and hide information is to randomize the SAT instance before outsourcing. In this paper, we present multiple novel methods to randomize SAT instances. We present a novel method to randomize the SAT instance, a variable randomization method to randomize the solution set, and methods to randomize Mincost SAT and MAX3SAT instances. Our analysis and evaluation show the correctness and feasibility of these randomization methods. The scalability and generality of our methods make it applicable for real world problems.

Problem

• Preventing data leakage in outsourced SAT-based verification computations
• Randomizing SAT instances to preserve privacy and security
• Developing scalable methods for Mincost SAT and MAX3SAT randomization

Innovation

• Randomize SAT instances before outsourcing
• Variable randomization for solution sets
• Methods for Mincost SAT and MAX3SAT