Privacy-Aware Search and Computation Over Encrypted Data Stores

Abstract

Systems today often handle massive amount of data with little regard to privacy or security issues that may arise. As corporations and governments increasingly monitor many aspects of our lives, the security and privacy concerns that surround big data has also become apparent. While anonymization is suggested for protecting user privacy, it has shown to be unreliable. In contrast, cryptographic techniques are well studied, and have provable and quantifiable security. There have been many works on enabling search over encrypted data. In this chapter, we look at some of the most important results in the area of searchable encryption and encrypted data processing, including encrypted indexes, Bloom filters and Boneh’s IBE based searchable encryption scheme. We’ll also discuss some of the most promising developments in recent years: performing range query through the use of order-preserving encryption and computing over ciphertext using homomorphic encryption. To better illustrate the techniques, the schemes are described in various sample applications involving text and media search.