MRSE SCHEME OVER ENCRYPTED CLOUD DATA FOR PRIVACY PRESERVING

To protect data privacy and combat unsolicited accesses in the cloud and beyond, sensitive data, e.g., emails, personal health records, photo albums, tax documents, financial transactions, etc., may have to be encrypted by data owners before outsourcing to the commercial public cloud; this, however, obsoletes the traditional data utilization service based on plaintext keyword search. The trivial solution of downloading all the data and decrypting locally is clearly impractical, due to the huge amount of bandwidth cost in cloud scale systems. Moreover, aside from eliminating the local storage management, storing data into the cloud serves no purpose unless they can be easily searched and utilized. Thus, exploring privacy-preserving and effective search service over encrypted cloud data is of paramount importance. In this abstract, for the first time, we define and solve the challenging problem of privacy-preserving multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted cloud data (MRSE). We establish a set of strict privacy requirements for such a secure cloud data utilization system. Among various multi-keyword semantics, we choose the efficient similarity measure of “coordinate matching”, i.e., as many matches as possible, to capture the relevance of data documents to the search query. We further use “inner product similarity” to quantitatively evaluate such similarity measure. We first propose a basic idea for the MRSE based on secure inner product computation, and then give two significantly improved MRSE schemes to achieve various stringent privacy requirements in two different threat models. Thorough analysis investigating privacy and efficiency guarantees of proposed schemes is given. Experiments on the real-world dataset further show proposed schemes indeed introduce low overhead on computation and communication.