A Privacy-Aware and User-Centric Approach for Query Processing in Cloud

Abstract

The pertinent advantages of cloud computing, such as on-demand scalability and pay-per-usage model, are pushing organizations for outsourcing their databases and computations to untrusted servers. Due to the growing privacy concerns and government regulations, data is often encrypted before being outsourced to a third-party cloud. However, this places various constraints on the basic functionalities that can be offered by the cloud. Specifically, query processing over encrypted databases in cloud has gained significant attention in database-as-a-service models. One of the fundamental problems in the context of query processing over encrypted data is to securely compare encrypted integers. Along this direction, we first propose a novel privacy-aware protocol for securely comparing two encrypted integers. Next, to demonstrate the applicability of our privacy-aware protocol, we show how it can be used as a building block to solve the problem of range queries over encrypted data in the cloud. Our preliminary investigation indicates that our proposed protocols incur negligible computation cost on the end-user and also ensure the confidentiality of the data, thus giving more control to the users over their privacy.