EFFICIENT MULTIKEYWORD SEARCHABLE SYMMETRIC ENCRYPTION SCHEME FOR SECURE DATA OUTSOURCING

Abstract

Cloud computing is a specialized form of distributed computing which introduces utilization models for remotely provisioning scalable and measured resources. The driving motivation behind the cloud computing is to provide IT resources as a service that encapsulates other IT resources. Data outsourcing is one of the service, which is economically enabled by the cloud computing. When the users outsource their private data onto the cloud, the cloud service providers are able to control and monitor the data and the communication between users and the cloud. The main threat to the data privacy roots in the cloud itself. To ensure privacy, users usually encrypt the data before outsourcing it onto cloud, which brings great challenges to effective data utilization. However, even if the encrypted data utilization is possible, users still need to communicate with the cloud and allow the cloud to operate on the encrypted data. This may potentially leak sensitive information in the form of search and access patterns. Secure storage has already captured the attention of many cloud providers, which offers a higher level of protection for their customer s data. Advanced techniques such as searchable encryption and secure outsourced computation have become popular, which open the doors of the cloud to the customers with higher security requirements.Data encryption protects data security to some extent, but at the cost of compromised efficiency. Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) allows retrieval of encrypted data over cloud thereby making data retrieval fast and efficient. These schemes guarantee the data security and preserve data privacy. During the whole process, no plain text data or keyword is visible to the cloud servers. To improve the feasibility and to save the expense in the cloud paradigm, it is preferred to get the retrieval result with the most relevant files that match users interest. Therefore, only the files with the highest relevance scores are sent back to users. newline