Client-side Encryption for Privacy-sensitive Applications on the Cloud

Abstract

There are important concerns when trusting sensitive information to the cloud. Health and financial records, for instance, suffer strict legal restrictions to data escrow. Organizations holding such information need to assure end-users and authorities that a third party will never access restricted data. Client-side encryption is a common solution in literature. Most works fail, however, to reason the impact of security solutions on performance and usability. Homomorphic and order preserving encryption systems can mitigate such negative impacts, as they allow the computation of regular searches over encrypted records on the cloud, while preserving information confidentiality and the privacy if end-users.