Collected research

Side-Channel Attacks on Shared Search Indexes

Liang Wang, Paul Grubbs, Jiahui Lu, Vincent Bindschaedler, David Cash and Thomas Ristenpart · ieee-security.org

Multi-tenant search indexes leak document frequency through relevance scores, so one tenant learns about other tenants' private documents. The attack maps shards, lands attacker documents beside a victim's, then brute-forces terms or counts private documents containing a word, demonstrated on GitHub, Orchestrate.io and Xen.do.

Record

Researcher

Liang Wang, Paul Grubbs, Jiahui Lu, Vincent Bindschaedler, David Cash and Thomas Ristenpart

Published by

ieee-security.org

Format

Whitepaper

Topic

Other

In the archive

• Collected in the 2016–17 research round

Tags

• side-channel
• info-leak
• elasticsearch
• mysql
• database
• github
• measurement-study
• mitigation

This page is the archive's own catalogue record. The research is the work of Liang Wang, Paul Grubbs, Jiahui Lu, Vincent Bindschaedler, David Cash and Thomas Ristenpart, first published at the original source. Preserved copies are kept so the citation survives its host; this one was last captured on 14 August 2026.