A scoping review of searchable encryption schemes in cloud computing: taxonomy, methods, and recent developments

Abstract

With the emergence of cloud computing, data owners are showing interest to outsource the data to the cloud servers and allowing the data users to access the data as and when required. However, outsourcing sensitive data into the cloud leads to privacy issues. Encrypting the data before outsourcing provides privacy, but it does not provide search functionality. To achieve search over encrypted data without compromising the privacy, searchable encryption (SE) schemes have been proposed. It protects the user’s sensitive information by providing searchability on encrypted data stored in the cloud. In this paper, we surveyed different SE schemes which are existed in the cloud domain. In this survey, we presented the taxonomy of the SE schemes: symmetric searchable encryption, public key searchable encryption, and attribute-based searchable encryption schemes, and then provided a detailed discussion on the SE schemes in terms of index structure and search functionality. A comparative analysis of SE schemes is also provided on security and performance. Furthermore, we discussed the challenges, future directions, and applications of SE schemes.