A practical and secure multi-keyword search method over encrypted cloud data

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CLOUD.2013.18

Cloud computing technologies become more and more popular every year, as many organizations tend to outsource their data utilizing robust and fast services of clouds while lowering the cost of hardware ownership. Although its benefits are welcomed, privacy is still a remaining concern that needs to be addressed. We propose an efficient privacy-preserving search method over encrypted cloud data that utilizes minhash functions. Most of the work in literature can only support a single feature search in queries which reduces the effectiveness. One of the main advantages of our proposed method is the capability of multi-keyword search in a single query. The proposed method is proved to satisfy adaptive semantic security definition. We also combine an effective ranking capability that is based on term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) values of keyword document pairs. Our analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is proved to be privacy-preserving, efficient and effective.