Fast Phrase Search for Encrypted Cloud Storage

Abstract

Cloud computing has generated much interest in the research community in recent years for its many advantages, but has also raise security and privacy concerns. The storage and access of confidential documents have been identified as one of the central problems in the area. In particular, many researchers investigated solutions to search over encrypted documents stored on remote cloud servers. While many schemes have been proposed to perform conjunctive keyword search, less attention has been noted on more specialized searching techniques. In this paper, we present a phrase search technique based on Bloom filters that is significantly faster than existing solutions, with similar or better storage and communication cost. Our technique uses a series of n-gram filters to support the functionality. The scheme exhibits a trade-off between storage and false positive rate, and is adaptable to defend against inclusion-relation attacks. A design approach based on an application's target false positive rate is also described.