DABKS: Dynamic attribute-based keyword search in cloud computing

Abstract

Due to its fast deployment and scalability, cloud computing has become a significant technology trend. Organizations with limited budgets can achieve great flexibility at a low price by outsourcing their data and query services to the cloud. Since the cloud is outside the organization's trusted domain, existing research suggests encrypting data before outsourcing to preserve user privacy. Two main problems that the cloud user faces while searching over encrypted data are how to achieve a fine-grained search authorization and how to efficiently update the search permission. The existing attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) scheme addresses the first problem, which allows a data owner to control the search of the outsourced encrypted data according to an access policy. This paper proposes a dynamic attribute-based keyword search (DABKS) scheme that incorporates proxy re-encryption (PRE) and a secret sharing scheme (SSS) into ABKS. The DABKS scheme, which allows the data owner to delegate policy updating operations to the cloud, takes full advantage of cloud resources. We conduct experiments on real data sets to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed scheme.