With the advent of cloud computing, data owners are motivated to outsource their complex data management systems from local sites to commercial public cloud for great flexibility and economic savings. But for protecting data privacy, sensitive data has to be encrypted before outsourcing, which obsoletes traditional data utilization based on plaintext keyword search. Thus, enabling an encrypted cloud data search service is of paramount importance. Considering the large number of data users and documents in cloud, it is crucial for the search service to allow multi-keyword query and provide result similarity ranking to meet the effective data retrieval need. Related works on searchable encryption focus on single keyword search or Boolean keyword search, and rarely differentiate the search results. In this paper, for the first time, we define and solve the challenging problem of privacy-preserving multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted cloud data (MRSE), and establish a set of strict privacy requirements for such a secure cloud data utilization system to become a reality. Among various multi-keyword semantics, we choose the efficient principle of "coordinate matching", i.e., as many matches as possible, to capture the similarity between search query and data documents, and further use "inner product similarity" to quantitatively formalize such principle for similarity measurement. We first propose a basic MRSE scheme using secure inner product computation, and then significantly improve it to meet different privacy requirements in two levels of threat models. Thorough analysis investigating privacy and efficiency guarantees of proposed schemes is given, and experiments on the real-world dataset further show proposed schemes indeed introduce low overhead on computation and communication.

With the advent of cloud computing, data owners are motivated to outsource their complex data management systems from local sites to the commercial public cloud for great flexibility and economic savings. But for protecting data privacy, sensitive data has to be encrypted before outsourcing, which obsoletes traditional data utilization based on plaintext keyword search. Thus, enabling an encrypted cloud data search service is of paramount importance. Considering the large number of data users and documents in the cloud, it is necessary to allow multiple keywords in the search request and return documents in the order of their relevance to these keywords. Related works on searchable encryption focus on single keyword search or Boolean keyword search, and rarely sort the search results. In this paper, for the first time, we define and solve the challenging problem of privacypreserving multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted cloud data (MRSE). We establish a set of strict privacy requirements for such a secure cloud data utilization system. Among various multikeyword semantics, we choose the efficient similarity measure of "coordinate matching", i.e., as many matches as possible, to capture the relevance of data documents to the search query. We further use "inner product similarity" to quantitatively evaluate such similarity measure. We first propose a basic idea for the MRSE based on secure inner product computation, and then give two significantly improved MRSE schemes to achieve various stringent privacy requirements in two different threat models. Thorough analysis investigating privacy and efficiency guarantees of proposed schemes is given. Experiments on the real-world dataset further show proposed schemes indeed introduce low overhead on computation and communication.

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