Survey on secure search over encrypted data on the cloud

Abstract

Cloud computing has become a potential resource for businesses and individuals to outsource their data to remote but highly accessible servers. However, the potential of cloud services has not been fully realized due to users concerns about data privacy and security. User-side encryption techniques can be employed to mitigate the security concerns, but once the data is encrypted, no processing (eg, searching) can be performed on the outsourced data. Searchable Encryption (SE) techniques have been widely studied to enable searching on the data while they are encrypted. These techniques enable various types of search on the encrypted data and offer different levels of security. While these techniques enable different search types and vary in details, they share similarities in their components and architectures. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on different secure search techniques, a high-level architecture for these systems, and an analysis of their performance and security level. KEYWORDScloud security, encrypted search, search over encrypted data, survey INTRODUCTIONAs cloud computing becomes prevalent, more cloud-based solutions are being developed and widely used in different applications. Companies that have adopted cloud storage solutions are reported to gain a competitive edge against those that have not. 1Cloud computing is favored due to its many advantages, including convenience and accessibility, consistent back ups to reducing the burden of local storage, and saving capital expenditure on in-house hardware and software maintenance. 2 However, public cloud storage services may be utilized by multi-tenant customers who store large amounts of potentially sensitive data on the cloud. Using cloud storage implies losing full control over data and delegating it to the cloud administrators, exposing the data to potential external and internal attacks, 3,4 which can be devastating for organizations that rely on confidentiality of their data (eg, financial corporations).These problems have made businesses concerned about outsourcing their data to the cloud and utilizing its potential. 5,6 For instance, a medical center that owns patients' health records cannot outsource its data to a cloud that is vulnerable to attacks, due to legal regulations. 7 In another instance, a law enforcement agency that keeps sensitive criminal records will hesitate to use cloud storage because of similar concerns.this approach remains impractical. Therefore, searchable encryption systems (eg, see other works 12-15 ) have been introduced to cope with this problem. These systems ideally allow the encrypted data to be searched without revealing the data and search query. Hence, they relieve concerns about data confidentiality in the cloud. Efforts to create searchable encryption systems date back to 2000 with work by Song et al. 11 Since then, numerous research works have been undertaken to enable different types of searchable encryption. Although these systems differ in their search approaches, security level, and perf...

Leveraging cloud computing for the semantic web: review and trends

“…The work by Fu et al (2018) further stated that there are various searchable encryption techniques for performing searches on secure outsourced data. Pham et al (2018) also proposed an architecture for delivering a secure search technique as a solution to the problem of searching over encrypted data in the cloud. Similarly, Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) schemes enhance the flexibility of accessing confidential data as well as the ease of sharing such data, as illustrated in Figure 3 which presents a search model of encrypted data in cloud.…”

Pindex: Private multi-linked index for encrypted document retrieval

“…The confidentiality of sensitive data like Electronic Health Records (EHR) outsourced to CSP is protected from external and internal attacks by deploying a searchable encryption scheme specially designed to support operations like search and updates over encrypted data [22].…”

A Secure Rotation Invariant LBP Feature Computation in Cloud Environment

“…With the popularity of data outsourcing services, there is an increasing need for data security [1,2] and privacy protection in cloud computing. Privacy-preserving outsourcing protocol provides an effective way to cope with this problem [3].…”