Secure and Verifiable Keyword Search in Multiple Clouds

Abstract

Searchable encryption enables users to perform a keyword-based search over encrypted data. Most of the existing searchable encryption schemes are based on the single cloud server model, which has some limitations, such as the single point of failure and malicious insiders. In contrast, the multicloud server model has higher data availability and security. However, directly moving the existing keyword search schemes to the multicloud would cause larger storage and search costs, and the data security cannot be distinctly improved. In addition, different from single cloud, a challenge is how to effectively verify query integrity when some cloud servers return incorrect or incomplete results in a multicloud situation. To ensure the data security, we propose an iterative encryption method to ensure the file privacy even if multiple cloud servers collude with each other. We use Bloom filter to map keywords and construct a tree index for each cloud server to achieve secure and efficient distributed keyword search. To verify the query integrity, we propose a fast verification algorithm to embed the file content and index information into the file ID. The analysis and experiments demonstrate the security and effectiveness of our scheme.