SearchaStore: fast and secure searchable cloud services

Abstract

The emergence of Cloud Computing is revolutionizing the way we store, query, analyze and consume data, which also bring forward other development that fundamentally changed our life style. For example, Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things (IoT) can improve the quality of manufacturing and many aspects in our daily life; both of them rely heavily on the cloud computing platform to develop. Central to this paradigm shift is the need to keep any common data, often held at remote outsourced locations and usually to be accessed by different authorized parties, secure from being leaked to unauthorized entities. When using the cloud services, consumer may want to encrypt sensitive data before uploading it to the cloud, but this will also eliminate the possibility to search the data efficiently in the cloud storage. A more practical solution to this is to employ a searchable encryption scheme in the cloud storage, so that user can query the encrypted data efficiently without revealing the sensitive data to the service provider. Besides the security and search features, performance of searchable encryption schemes is also very important when it comes to practical applications. In this paper, we propose several techniques to accelerate the search performance of encrypted data stored on the cloud. Notably, our techniques include massively parallel file encryption, multi-array keyword red black tree (KRBT) implementation, batched keyword search and enhanced parallel search in KRBT. To the best of our knowledge, SearchaStore is the first work that attempts to accelerate searchable encryption using GPU technology.