Practical techniques for searches on encrypted data

Abstract

It is desirable to store data on data storage servers such as mail servers and file servers in encrypted form to reduce security and privacy risks. But this usually implies that one has to sacrifice functionality for security. For example, if a client wishes to retrieve only documents containing certain words, it was not previously known how to let the data storage server perform the search and answer the query without loss of data confidentiality. In this paper, we describe our cryptographic schemes for the problem of searching on encrypted data and provide proofs of security for the resulting crypto systems. Our techniques have a number of crucial advantages. They are provably secure: they provide provable secrecy for encryption, in the sense that the untrusted server cannot learn anything about the plaintext when only given the ciphertext; they provide query isolation for searches, meaning that the untrusted server cannot learn anything more about the plaintext than the search result; they provide controlled searching, so that the untrusted server cannot search for an arbitrary word without the user's authorization; they also support hidden queries, so that the user may ask the untrusted server to search for a secret word without revealing the word to the server. The algorithms we present are simple, fast (for a document of length Ò, the encryption and search algorithms only need Ç´Òµ stream cipher and block cipher operations), and introduce almost no space and communication overhead, and hence are practical to use today.

CloudID: Trustworthy cloud-based and cross-enterprise biometric identification

“…When a query is performed, the provider should learn nothing but the value of a conjunctive predicate. We modify a search-aware encryption technique (Song, Wagner, & Perrig, 2000;Boneh & Waters, 2007) to make it applicable for biometric data.…”

“…To provide trustworthy data storage and data search capabilities, CloudID makes use of search-aware encryption (Boneh & Waters, 2007;Song et al, 2000) to prevent attackers from gaining unauthorized access to the confidentially-sensitive biometric data records. Let us assume that the trusted party intends to encrypt and send a user's biometric data record, denoted by B, to the cloud for secure storage and remote biometric matching that requires query processing over encrypted data.…”

Efficient Ranked and Secure File Retrieval in Cloud Computing

“…However, such data encryptions render effective data utilization a very challenging task due to the basic reason that there could be a large amount of outsourced data files. Not only that, many a times, in Cloud Computing, data owners may share their complete outsourced data with a large number of users, who actually might want to retrieve only certain specific data files that they are interested in during a given session (Ming et al, 2011;Murugesan, 2011;Huang et al, 2013;Song et al, 2000;Wang et al, 2010;2012;Witten et al, 1999;Yu et al, 2013).…”

Access Control in Data Management Systems

“…Privacy homomorphisms are encryption transformations that allow one to calculate arithmetic operations directly on encrypted data. Other techniques (e.g., [Song et al, 2000]) have been developed for textual data and allow keyword-based searches over textual encrypted data. To perform selection queries the basic idea is to divide the domain of each attribute in a relation R into distinguished partitions, with an associated id.…”

“…Brinkman et al [2004] developed an encryption technique for XML, based on the work of Song et al [2000], exploiting its tree structure. Brinkman et al [2004] developed an encryption technique for XML, based on the work of Song et al [2000], exploiting its tree structure.…”