Title: Searchable encryption architectures: survey of the literature and proposing a unified architecture

Authors: Wesam Almobaideen; Hebatullah Jarboua; Khair Eddin Sabri

Addresses: The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan; Rochester Institute of Technology, Dubai, UAE ' The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan ' The University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan

Abstract: While the world is developing rapidly, cloud security becomes the main concern of the era, especially when dealing with big data and different environments. Users and different organisations are willing to store large amount of data on the cloud securely in order to be protected against many threats. One way to achieve this goal is to encrypt data before being sent to the cloud. Searchable encryption techniques are used to process the encrypted data on the cloud without the need to download or decrypt that data in order to preserve the required security. Up to our knowledge, and after conducting an extensive search, none of the previous surveys have dealt with searchable encryption (SE) architectures. This is what has motivated us to compare different kinds of searchable encryption architectures, determine their components and illustrate their functionalities. This is done in order to make it easier for researchers to get into the details of this important field of could security. Afterward, we propose a new unified searchable encryption architecture that can be considered as a reference for creating new searchable encryption schemes or models.

Keywords: searchable encryption; cloud computing; information security; smart home.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIPSI.2020.115508

International Journal of Information Privacy, Security and Integrity, 2020 Vol.4 No.4, pp.237 - 260

Accepted: 04 Dec 2020
Published online: 07 Jun 2021 *

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