Efficient Multi-Keyword Ranked Search over Encrypted Data for Multi-Data-Owner Settings
Mahmoud Nabil, Ahmad Mostafa Alsharif, Ahmed Sherif, Mohamed M. E. A. Mahmoud, Mohamed Younis · 2018
The availability of high-performance computing platforms, large storage devices, and high- speed communications have boosted the popularity of cloud computing. Users exploit these capabilities by using the cloud as a repository for their data and sharing these data with others. However, since the cloud is usually owned and operated by private companies, storing sensitive data in the cloud servers raises privacy concerns. To address these concerns, privacy-preserving keyword search schemes have been developed. Nevertheless, most of the existing schemes are either inefficient for multi-data- owner settings or designed for single-data-owner settings, and becomes insecure and inefficient when used for multi-data-owner. This paper proposes an efficient multi-keyword ranked search scheme over encrypted data for multi-data-owner settings. The proposed scheme allows each data owner and each user to have a distinct key, and allows the server to efficiently search the files of different data owners using one encrypted query sent by the user. Our privacy analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme can preserve the privacy of the data owners and users. In addition, our extensive performance evaluations demonstrate that our scheme is much more efficient than existing approaches in the literature.