Secure and privacy preserving keyword searching for cloud storage services

Cloud storage services enable users to remotely access data in a cloud anytime and anywhere, using any device, in a pay-as-you-go manner. Moving data into a cloud offers great convenience to users since they do not have to care about the large capital investment in both the deployment and management of the hardware infrastructures. However, allowing a cloud service provider (CSP), whose purpose is mainly for making a profit, to take the custody of sensitive data, raises underlying security and privacy issues. To keep user data confidential against an untrusted CSP, a natural way is to apply cryptographic approaches, by disclosing the data decryption key only to authorized users. However, when a user wants to retrieve files containing certain keywords using a thin client, the adopted encryption system should not only support keyword searching over encrypted data, but also provide high performance. In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of cloud storage services and propose a secure and privacy preserving keyword searching (SPKS) scheme, which allows the CSP to participate in the decipherment, and to return only files containing certain keywords specified by the users, so as to reduce both the computational and communication overhead in decryption for users, on the condition of preserving user data privacy and user querying privacy. Performance analysis shows that the SPKS scheme is applicable to a cloud environment.