Algorithm for Multi Keyword Search Over Encrypted Data in Cloud Environment

With the development of cloud computing, the sensitive information of outsourced data is at risk of unauthorized accesses. To protect data privacy, the sensitive data should be encrypted by the data owner before outsourcing, which makes the traditional and efficient plaintext keyword search technique useless. Hence, it is an especially important thing to explore secure encrypted cloud data search service. Considering the huge number of outsourced data, there are three problems we are focused on to enable efficient search service: multi-keyword search, result relevance ranking and dynamic update. In this paper, we propose a practically efficient and flexible searchable encrypted scheme which supports both multi-keyword ranked search and dynamic update. To support multi-keyword search and result relevance ranking, we adopt Vector Space Model (VSM) to build the searchable index to achieve accurate search result. To improve search efficiency, we design a tree-based index structure which supports insertion and deletion update well without privacy leakage. We propose a secure search scheme to meet the privacy requirements in the threat model. Finally, experiments on real-world dataset are implemented to demonstrate the overall performance of the proposed scheme, which show our scheme is efficient.

With the increasing adoption of cloud computing, a growing number of users outsource their datasets to cloud. To preserve privacy, the datasets are usually encrypted before outsourcing. However, the common practice of encryption makes the effective utilization of the data difficult. For example, it is difficult to search the given keywords in encrypted datasets. Many schemes are proposed to make encrypted data searchable based on keywords. However, keyword-based search schemes ignore the semantic representation information of users' retrieval, and cannot completely meet with users search intention. Therefore, how to design a content-based search scheme and make semantic search more effective and context-aware is a difficult challenge. In this paper, we propose ECSED, a novel semantic search scheme based on the concept hierarchy and the semantic relationship between concepts in the encrypted datasets. ECSED uses two cloud servers. One is used to store the outsourced datasets and return the ranked results to data users. The other one is used to compute the similarity scores between the documents and the query and send the scores to the first server. To further improve the search efficiency, we utilize a tree-based index structure to organize all the document index vectors. We employ the multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted cloud data as our basic frame to propose two secure schemes. The experiment results based on the real world datasets show that the scheme is more efficient than previous schemes. We also prove that our schemes are secure under the known ciphertext model and the known background model.

As Cloud Computing becomes prevalent, more and more sensitive information are being centralized into the cloud. For the protection of data privacy, sensitive data usually have to be encrypted before outsourcing, which makes effective data utilization a very challenging task. Although traditional searchable encryption schemes allow a user to securely search over encrypted data through keywords and selectively retrieve files of interest, these techniques support only exact keyword search. This significant drawback makes existing techniques unsuitable in cloud computing as it is greatly affect system usability, rendering user searching experiences very frustrating and system efficiency very low. In this paper, for the first time we formalize and solve the problem of effective fuzzy keyword search over encrypted cloud while maintaining keyword privacy. In our solution, we exploit edit distance to quantify keyword similarity and develop new advanced technique on constructing fuzzy keyword sets which greatly reduces the storage and representation overheads. In this way, we show that our proposed solution is secure and privacy preserving, while realizing the goal of fuzzy keyword search.

The rapid adoption of cloud computing has transformed the way data is stored, shared, and accessed across organizationsand individuals. Despite its scalability and cost efficiency, cloud storage introduces serious security and privacy challenges, particularly when sensitive data is outsourced to third-party cloud service providers. Traditional access control mechanisms often rely on the cloud provider’s trustworthiness, which may expose data to unauthorized access, insider threats, and data breaches. To address these concerns, CryptCloud+ is proposed as a secure and expressive data access control framework that enforces fine-grained authorization directly through cryptographic techniques. CryptCloud+ focuses on ensuring data confidentiality while enabling flexible and policy-driven access control over encrypted cloud data. The system leverages encryption-based access control, where data is encrypted before being uploaded to the cloud, and only authorized users possessing valid cryptographic credentials can decrypt and access the data. This approach eliminates the need to trust the cloud service provider, as all sensitive operations related to data access are handled at the client side. A key contribution of CryptCloud+ is its support for expressive access policies, allowing data owners to define complex rules based on user attributes such as roles, departments, access levels, or time constraints. These policies enable fine grained access control without requiring data owners to manage individual permissions manually. The framework ensures that users can access only the data they are authorized for, while unauthorized users, including cloud administrators, are unable to infer any meaningful information from the encrypted data. The proposed system is implemented using Python, taking advantage of its robust cryptographic libraries, simplicity, and integration capabilities. Python-based modules handle key generation, encryption, decryption, and policy enforcement, making the system modular and easy to extend. The implementation demonstrates how secure key management and attribute-based access enforcement can be achieved efficiently in a real-world cloud environment. CryptCloud+ also addresses scalability and performance concerns by minimizing computation overhead during data access. Encryption and decryption operations are optimized to ensure that system performance remains practical even as the number of users and data files increases. Experimental results indicate that the framework maintains strong security guarantees while providing acceptable response times for authorized users. In addition to security, the system enhances usability by allowing seamless data sharing among multiple users without re encrypting data for each individual. This significantly reduces management complexity for data owners while preserving strict access control policies. The system design ensures compatibility with existing cloud storage services, making itadaptable to various deployment scenarios. Overall, CryptCloud+ presents a secure, flexible, and effiient solution for cloud data access control. By combining cryptographic enforcement with expressive policy definition and Python-based implementation, the frameworkstrengthens data security, protects user privacy, and improves trust in cloud storage systems. The proposed model demonstrates the feasibility of practical, cryptography-driven access control for modern cloud environments.

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a smart way to reduce IT cost, provide services anywhere, and any time. Encrypting the outsourced data is one way of enhancing the privacy from the owner point of view. Mobile devices consumes more resources when workload is heavy. In order to reduce, computation, communication and searching time of related files based on keyword query "An Efficient Search Scheme over Encrypted Data with Indexing on Mobile Cloud" (SSEIM) is proposed. The SSEIM uses the keyword-based search that includes Order Preserving Encryption (OPE) to order the encrypted data and makes use of indexing the record to search the related files. Thus, the proposed scheme is more efficient with respect to retrieval time as compared to the existing scheme TEES (Traffic and Energy saving Encrypted Search).

Cloud storage provides the great convenience for people to access their data at anytime from any place. Since cloud storage is usually run by the third-party service provider, keyword search over cloud data with privacy protection is of great importance. Many studies in the literature have proposed keyword search scheme for document search, but, in most schemes, the query keywords must exactly match those in the document indexes. However, it is impractical to restrict query keywords provided by the user when performing the search. This paper proposes the scheme for semantic multi-keyword search over encrypted cloud data. Users are able to select query keywords on their own choice. In addition, the query privacy of the user and the security of the documents are protected simultaneously through encrypted document search to prevent snooping from the cloud service provider. Experiments are conducted using a dataset of massive real world papers. The results show that the proposed scheme can effectively perform the semantic multi-keyword search over encrypted cloud data with great efficiency.

In cloud computing model, the data are usually encrypted before outsourced to the cloud server, which protects the data privacy, but also leaves keyword searches over ciphertext data a challenging problem. A keyword search scheme over encrypted data should achieve both index privacy and query privacy; moreover, verification of search results is desirable because the incorrectf results can be returned owing to system defects or the cloud server’s motivation to save computation recourses. Many multi-keyword search schemes have been proposed; however, few of these schemes are verifiable and adaptively index-hiding and adaptively query-hiding. In this paper, a semantically secure multi-keyword search scheme is constructed, which is adaptively index-hiding and adaptively query-hiding, also supports the correctness verification of search results. We provide a detailed performance comparison and give a thorough security proof by a sequence of games. The combined results demonstrate that our scheme is secure and practical.

Cross-lingual multi-keyword rank search with semantic extension over encrypted data

Extreme learning machine (ELM) as a machine learning method has been successfully applied to many classification problems. However, when applying ELM to classification tasks on the encrypted data in cloud, the classification performance is extremely low. Due to the data encryption, ELM is hard to extract informative features from the encrypted data for correct classification. Moreover, the trained neural network is un-protected on the cloud environments, that makes cloud service highly risky to the attackers. In this paper, we propose a novel fully homomorphic ELM (Homo-ELM), which makes cloud searching tasks under a fully protected environment without compromising the privacy of users. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a comprehensive experiment on both cloud and local environments. The experiment results show that Homo-ELM can achieve high accuracy on the local environments as well as cloud environments than other machine learning methods.

With remote storage systems, a user may store his data in the encrypted form at the remote storage server to preserve confidentiality. Later, the user wants to receive his data securely through an untrusted network. The user does not want to receive all of the stored data but the data related to specific words, to reduce the communication overload in the network. In this case, we need secure and efficient keyword search schemes over the encrypted data. In the paper, we show that the keyword search schemes suggested by Byun et al. and Ballard et al. do not provide semantic security which is the most important security requirement for the keyword search schemes.

A Study on Deduplication Techniques over Encrypted Data

VPAMS: Verifiable and practical attribute-based multi-keyword search over encrypted cloud data

As cloud computing becomes prevalent, more and more sensitive data is being centralized into the cloud by users. To maintain the confidentiality of sensitive user data against untrusted servers, the data should be encrypted before they are uploaded. However, this raises a new challenge for performing search over the encrypted data efficiently. Although the existing searchable encryption schemes allow a user to search the encrypted data with confidentiality, these solutions cannot support the verifiability of searching result. We argue that a cloud server may be selfish in order to save its computation ability or bandwidth. For example, it may execute only a fraction of the search and returns part of the searching result. In this paper, we propose a new verifiable fuzzy keyword search scheme based on the symbol-tree which not only supports the fuzzy keyword search, but also enjoys the verifiability of the searching result. Through rigorous security and efficiency analysis, we show that our proposed scheme is secure under the proposed model, while correctly and efficiently realizing the verifiable fuzzy keyword search. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.

In cloud computing, documents can be outsourced to the cloud server to achieve flexible access control and efficient sharing among multiple users. The outsourced documents can be intelligently searched according to some keywords with the help of cloud server. During the search process, some private information of outsourced documents may be leaked since the keywords may contain sensitive information of users. However, existing privacy-preserving keyword search schemes have high computation complexity, which are not suitable for resource-constrained end devices—that is, the data processing and search trapdoor generation procedures require users to take resource-intensive computations, e.g., high-dimensional matrix operations, exponentiations and bilinear pairings, which are unaffordable by resource-constrained devices. To address the issues of efficiency and privacy for realizing sorted multi-keyword search over outsourced data in clouds, this paper proposes a lightweight privacy-preserving ranked multi-keyword search (PRMS) scheme, which is further extended to allow each outsourced document to be associated with multiple types of keywords. The searched documents can be sorted according to their similarity scores between the search query and the keyword index of documents, so that only when the similarity score exceeds a given threshold, the corresponding searched document will be returned. The security analysis demonstrates that the proposed PRMS schemes can guarantee the privacy of outsourced documents and keywords, and provides unlinkability for search trapdoors. Performance analysis and comparison show the practicality of the proposed PRMS schemes.

Although searchable encryption schemes allow secure search over the encrypted data, they mostly support conventional Boolean keyword search, without capturing any relevance of the search results. This leads to a large amount of post-processing overhead to find the most matching documents and causes an unnecessary communication cost between the servers and end-users. Such problems can be addressed efficiently using a ranked search system that retrieves the most relevant documents. However, existing state-of-the-art solutions in the context of Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) suffer from either (a) security and privacy breaches due to the use of Order Preserving Encryption (OPE) or (b) non-practical solutions like using the two non-colluding servers. In this paper, we present a generic solution for multi-keyword ranked search over the encrypted cloud data. The proposed solution can be applied over different symmetric searchable encryption schemes. To demonstrate the practicality of our technique, in this paper we leverage the Oblivious Cross Tags (OXT) protocol of Cash et al. (2013) due to its scalability and remarkable flexibility to support different settings. Our proposed scheme supports the multi-keyword search on Boolean, ranked and limited range queries while keeping all of the OXT’s properties intact. The key contribution of this paper is that our scheme is resilience against all common attacks that take advantage of OPE leakage while only a single cloud server is used. Moreover, the results indicate that using the proposed solution the communication overhead decreases drastically when the number of matching results is large.