RESeED: Regular Expression Search over Encrypted Data in the Cloud

Abstract

Capabilities for trustworthy cloud-based computing and data storage require usable, secure and efficient solutions which allow clients to remotely store and process their data in the cloud. In this paper, we present RESeED, a tool which provides user-transparent and cloud-agnostic search over encrypted data using regular expressions without requiring cloud providers to make changes to their existing infrastructure. When a client asks RESeED to upload a new file in the cloud, RESeED analyzes the file's content and updates novel data structures accordingly, encrypting and transferring the new data to the cloud. RESeED provides regular expression search over this encrypted data by translating queries on-the-fly to finite automata and analyzes efficient and secure representations of the data before asking the cloud to download the encrypted files. We evaulate a working prototype of RESeED experimentally (currently publicly available) and show the scalability and correctness of our approach using real-world data sets from arXiv.org and the IETF. We show absolute accuracy for RESeED, with very low (6%) overhead, and high performability, even beating grep for some benchmarks.