Efficient verifiable fuzzy keyword search over encrypted data in cloud computing

Abstract

As cloud computing becomes prevalent, more and more sensitive data is being centralized into the cloud by users. To maintain the confidentiality of sensitive user data against untrusted servers, the data should be encrypted before they are uploaded. However, this raises a new challenge for performing search over the encrypted data efficiently. Although the existing searchable encryption schemes allow a user to search the encrypted data with confidentiality, these solutions cannot support the verifiability of searching result. We argue that a cloud server may be selfish in order to save its computation ability or bandwidth. For example, it may execute only a fraction of the search and returns part of the searching result. In this paper, we propose a new verifiable fuzzy keyword search scheme based on the symbol-tree which not only supports the fuzzy keyword search, but also enjoys the verifiability of the searching result. Through rigorous security and efficiency analysis, we show that our proposed scheme is secure under the proposed model, while correctly and efficiently realizing the verifiable fuzzy keyword search. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.