Implementation of searchable symmetric encryption for privacy-preserving keyword search on cloud storage

Abstract

BackgroundWith the rapid development of cloud computing and mobile networking technologies, users tend to access their stored data from the remote cloud storage with mobile devices. The main advantage of cloud storage is its ubiquitous user accessibility and also its virtually unlimited data storage capabilities. Despite such benefits provided by the cloud, the major challenge that remains is the concern over the confidentiality and privacy of data while adopting the cloud storage services [1]. For instance, unencrypted user data stored at the remote cloud server can be vulnerable to external attacks initiated by unauthorized outsiders and internal attacks initiated by the untrustworthy cloud service providers (CSPs) [2]. There are several reports that confirm data breaches related to cloud servers, due to malicious attack, theft or internal errors [3]. This raises concern for many users/ AbstractEnsuring the cloud data security is a major concern for corporate cloud subscribers and in some cases for the private cloud users. Confidentiality of the stored data can be managed by encrypting the data at the client side before outsourcing it to the remote cloud storage server. However, once the data is encrypted, it will limit server's capability for keyword search since the data is encrypted and server simply cannot make a plaintext keyword search on encrypted data. But again we need the keyword search functionality for efficient retrieval of data. To maintain user's data confidentiality, the keyword search functionality should be able to perform over encrypted cloud data and additionally it should not leak any information about the searched keyword or the retrieved document. This is known as privacy preserving keyword search. This paper aims to study privacy preserving keyword search over encrypted cloud data. Also, we present our implementation of a privacy preserving data storage and retrieval system in cloud computing. For our implementation, we have chosen one of the symmetric key primitives due to its efficiency in mobile environments. The implemented scheme enables a user to store data securely in the cloud by encrypting it before outsourcing and also provides user capability to search over the encrypted data without revealing any information about the data or the query. Salam et al. Hum. Cent. Comput. Inf. Sci. (2015) et al. Hum. Cent. Comput. Inf. Sci. (2015) 5:19 organizations as the outsourced data might contain very sensitive personal organization/ information. RESEARCHPage 2 of 16 SalamSeveral researches have addressed the issue of ensuring confidentiality and privacy of cloud data without compromising the user functionality. Here, confidentiality refers to the secrecy of the stored data so that only the client can read the contents of the stored data. To solve the problem of confidentiality, data encryption schemes can come in handy to provide the users with some control over the secrecy of their stored data. This has been adopted by many recent researches which allow users to encrypt their data...

Efficient privacy‐preserving scheme supporting disjunctive multi‐keyword search with ranking

“…In all these SE schemes, the data-owner encrypts the documents in the collection and then provides the trapdoor to the end-users for data searching and access. [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] These SE schemes can be classified either as ''conjunctive search scheme'' or ''disjunctive search scheme.'' A conjunctive search scheme is one that can retrieve only those documents which contain all the search terms present in the search query.…”

“…To overcome these drawbacks, various researchers have proposed searchable encryption (SE) schemes to provide efficient retrieval of the outsourced encrypted documents. In all these SE schemes, the data‐owner encrypts the documents in the collection and then provides the trapdoor to the end‐users for data searching and access . These SE schemes can be classified either as “conjunctive search scheme” or “disjunctive search scheme.” A conjunctive search scheme is one that can retrieve only those documents which contain all the search terms present in the search query.…”

Security Scheme Based on Parameter Hiding Technic for Mobile Communication in a Secure Cyber World

“…In other words, authentication of user personal profile information that is saved in HSS is executed using MME; at this time, eNB is used as a connection instrument [16,17]. However, there are various threats that can harm the entire LTE network by tracing attacks, terminal tracing attacks, and privacy infringement attacks during a LTE initial attach process [18][19][20].…”

User Verifiable Multiple Keyword Search Scheme using the Merkle Tree for Outsourced Data in the Cloud

“…Symmetric searchable encryption along with implementation results is discussed by Salam et al (2015). Sharable IDbased encryption employing a single keyword search scheme is also proposed by Xu et al (2015).…”