Achieving Secure, Universal, and Fine-Grained Query Results Verification for Secure Search Scheme Over Encrypted Cloud Data

Abstract

Secure search techniques over encrypted cloud data allow an authorized user to query data files of interest by submitting encrypted query keywords to the cloud server in a privacy-preserving manner. However, in practice, the returned query results may be incorrect or incomplete in the dishonest cloud environment. For example, the cloud server may intentionally omit some qualified results to save computational resources and communication overhead. Thus, a well-functioning secure query system should provide a query results verification mechanism that allows the data user to verify results. In this paper, we design a secure, easily integrated, and fine-grained query results verification mechanism, by which, given an encrypted query results set, the query user not only can verify the correctness of each data file in the set but also can further check how many or which qualified data files are not returned if the set is incomplete before decryption. The verification scheme is loose-coupling to concrete secure search techniques and can be very easily integrated into any secure query scheme. We achieve the goal by constructing secure verification object for encrypted cloud data. Furthermore, a short signature technique with extremely small storage cost is proposed to guarantee the authenticity of verification object and a verification object request technique is presented to allow the query user to securely obtain the desired verification object. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed schemes are practical and efficient.

Searchable encryption: A survey on privacy‐preserving search schemes on encrypted outsourced data

“…257 Hence, various researchers [27][28][29]43,50,55,70,75,[257][258][259] have incorporated the concept of result verification to searchable encryption. As an example, there may be a scenario where, during peak hours, the cloud server forwards incomplete or forged results to the end users.…”

“…There is also a possibility that the cloud server may claim that there is no matching document corresponding to a search query, whereas, actually, documents with the search keywords exist. 257 Hence, various researchers [27][28][29]43,50,55,70,75,[257][258][259] have incorporated the concept of result verification to searchable encryption. 260 Result verification includes correctness, ie, the results retrieved corresponding to the query actually exist in the database and are unmodified; completeness, ie, all the relevant documents are retrieved, which means none of the qualified documents are omitted; and freshness, ie, the latest copy/version of the documents is returned to the end user.…”

A Key-Policy Searchable Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme for Efficient Keyword Search and Fine-Grained Access Control over Encrypted Data

“…Recently, the dynamic SE schemes are further investigated in [8][9][10] to achieve better efficiency and security. To allow for the correctness and completeness verification of search results, the verifiable SE was introduced by Kurosawa and Ohtaki [11] against the unreliable server [12], which may return incorrect and incomplete search results to the data user. By using the emerging blockchain technique, decentralized SE schemes are designed in [13,14], which can ensure that the data user can always receive the correct and complete search results.…”

“…SearchNode(I(w), ST u ( w), r) = e(g, g) sq r (0)H( w) = e(g, g) syH( w) = e(g y , g) sH( w) = e(g 1 , g) sH( w) = I (12)…”

Efficient Oblivious Data Structures for Database Services on the Cloud

“…Various privacy enhancing technologies have been developed toward addressing the aforementioned privacy vs. data utilization dilemma. For instance, the client can use special encryption techniques such as SQL-aware encryption (e.g., [1], [2]) or searchable encryption with various security, efficiency and query functionality trade-offs (e.g., [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]) to achieve the data confidentiality and usability on the cloud. However, even such encryption techniques might not be sufficient for privacycritical database applications (e.g., healthcare) since sensi- tive information may be revealed through access patterns when the client execute encrypted queries on the encrypted database.…”