Title: Privacy preserving search over multiple servers

Authors: Ayad Ibrahim; Hai Jin; Ali A. Yassin; Deqing Zou

Addresses: Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China ' Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China ' Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China ' Cluster and Grid Computing Lab, Services Computing Technology and System Lab, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

Abstract: Search over encrypted data is a hot topic. In this paper, we propose a secure scheme for searching the encrypted servers. Such scheme enables the authorised user to search multiple servers with multi-keyword queries and retrieve the most relevant documents in a descending order with respect to their relevance to the query, without compromising the privacy of his query and the contents of documents he retrieved. In such a setting, each data owner builds his own searchable index, and associates with each document in that index its weight score, which facilitates document ranking. To protect the privacy of these weights, we utilise the privacy preserving mapping (PPM) primitive, while preserving their capability to perform the ranking process. We have conducted several empirical analyses on a real dataset to demonstrate the performance of our proposed scheme.

Keywords: cloud computing; searchable encryption; ranked search; distributed information retrieval; privacy preserving mapping; PPM; bloom filter.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAACS.2017.088777

International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems, 2017 Vol.10 No.4, pp.426 - 442

Received: 29 Jan 2013
Accepted: 26 May 2013

Published online: 19 Dec 2017 *

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