Semantic, Efficient, and Secure Search over Encrypted Cloud Data

Abstract

Companies and individuals demand more and more storage space and computing power. For this purpose, several new technologies have been designed and implemented, such as the cloud computing. This technology provides its users with storage space and computing power according to their needs in a flexible and personalized way. However, the outsourced data such as emails, electronic health records, and company reports are sensitive and confidential. Therefore, It is primordial to protect the outsourced data against possible external attacks and the cloud server itself. That is why it is highly recommended to encrypt the sensitive data before being outsourced to a remote server. To perform searches over outsourced data, it is no longer possible to exploit traditional search engines given that these data are encrypted. Consequently, lots of searchable encryption (SE) schemes have been proposed in the literature. Three major research axes of searchable encryption area have been studied in the literature. The first axis consists in ensuring the security of the search approach. Indeed, the search process should be performed without decryption any data and without causing any sensitive information leakage. The second axis consists in studying the search performance. In fact, the encrypted indexes are less efficient than the plaintext indexes, which makes the searchable encryption schemes very slow in practice. More the approach is secure, less it is efficient, thus, the challenge consists in finding the best compromise between security and performance. Finally, the third research axis consists in the quality of the returned results in terms of relevance and recall. The problem is that the encryption of the index causes the degradation of the recall and the precision. Therefore, the goal is to propose a technique that is able to obtain almost the same result obtained in the traditional search.