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An efficient privacy-preserving multi-keyword search over encrypted cloud data with ranking

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Abstract

Information search and retrieval from a remote database (e.g., cloud server) involves a multitude of privacy issues. Submitted search terms and their frequencies, returned responses and order of their relevance, and retrieved data items may contain sensitive information about the users. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-keyword search scheme that ensures users’ privacy against both external adversaries including other authorized users and cloud server itself. The proposed scheme uses cryptographic techniques as well as query and response randomization. Provided that the security and randomization parameters are appropriately chosen, both search terms in queries and returned responses are protected against privacy violations. The scheme implements strict security and privacy requirements that essentially disallow linking queries featuring identical search terms. We also incorporate an effective ranking capability in the scheme that enables user to retrieve only the top matching results. Our comprehensive analytical study and extensive experiments using both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed scheme is privacy-preserving, effective, and highly efficient.

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Notes

  1. More than one key can be used in trapdoors for the search terms.

  2. Metadata does not contain useful information about the content of the matched documents.

  3. In fact, I i , which is calculated for the search term w i as explained in Sect. 5.1 is the trapdoor for the keyword w i .

  4. Users, but not the server, can identify the fake index entries. Since there is no document corresponding to fake entries, they will be discarded by the user.

  5. The number of levels and the weights of each level can be chosen in any convenient way.

  6. Computing bitwise product is negligible compared the overall operations the user performs.

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Acknowledgements

The work was in part supported by the European Union project UBIPOL (Ubiquitous Participation Platform for Policy Making). We would like to thank TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) for the Ph.D. fellowship supports granted to Cengiz Örencik. We would also like to thank Prof. Yucel Saygin for his valuable suggestions. Finally, we also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Cengiz Örencik & Erkay Savaş

Authors
  1. Cengiz Örencik
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  2. Erkay Savaş
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Correspondence to Cengiz Örencik.

Additional information

Communicated by Elena Ferrari.

Part of this work is presented in PAIS 2012 [1].

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Örencik, C., Savaş, E. An efficient privacy-preserving multi-keyword search over encrypted cloud data with ranking. Distrib Parallel Databases 32, 119–160 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10619-013-7123-9

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