[Formula: see text]: Oblivious similarity based searching for encrypted data outsourced to an untrusted domain

PLoS One. 2017 Jul 10;12(7):e0179720. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0179720. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

Public cloud storage services are becoming prevalent and myriad data sharing, archiving and collaborative services have emerged which harness the pay-as-you-go business model of public cloud. To ensure privacy and confidentiality often encrypted data is outsourced to such services, which further complicates the process of accessing relevant data by using search queries. Search over encrypted data schemes solve this problem by exploiting cryptographic primitives and secure indexing to identify outsourced data that satisfy the search criteria. Almost all of these schemes rely on exact matching between the encrypted data and search criteria. A few schemes which extend the notion of exact matching to similarity based search, lack realism as those schemes rely on trusted third parties or due to increase storage and computational complexity. In this paper we propose Oblivious Similarity based Search ([Formula: see text]) for encrypted data. It enables authorized users to model their own encrypted search queries which are resilient to typographical errors. Unlike conventional methodologies, [Formula: see text] ranks the search results by using similarity measure offering a better search experience than exact matching. It utilizes encrypted bloom filter and probabilistic homomorphic encryption to enable authorized users to access relevant data without revealing results of search query evaluation process to the untrusted cloud service provider. Encrypted bloom filter based search enables [Formula: see text] to reduce search space to potentially relevant encrypted data avoiding unnecessary computation on public cloud. The efficacy of [Formula: see text] is evaluated on Google App Engine for various bloom filter lengths on different cloud configurations.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Cloud Computing
  • Computer Security*
  • Information Dissemination*
  • Search Engine*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by a grant from Kyung Hee University in 2017 (KHU-20170427). Part of this research was also supported by Zayed University Research Cluster Award (R16086). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.