Ensuring correctness of range searches on encrypted cloud data

Abstract

We target at one newly introduced security concern which is not fully addressed when moving (encrypted) data to the cloud, namely, the security of the search results from the cloud. The cloud storage provider (CSP) might be compromised or simply act maliciously for their own good, which yields incorrect search results. In this paper, we exploit hidden vector encryption to tackle this important security problem. Our construction enables CSPs to provide a proof of the search results to be verified later by the cloud storage users. In particular, this proposed scheme handles equality and range searches on encrypted data. Users can verified the correctness of the search results without decrypting for the corresponding file contents. Any tampering with the search results by CSPs will be caught, while any incorrect charge against CSPs for tampering search results can be rectified. Finally, we present extensive security and performance analysis to show the security and practicality of our scheme.