Survey on secure search over encrypted data on the cloud

Abstract

SummaryCloud computing has become a potential resource for businesses and individuals to outsource their data to remote but highly accessible servers. However, the potential of cloud services has not been fully realized due to users concerns about data privacy and security. User‐side encryption techniques can be employed to mitigate the security concerns, but once the data is encrypted, no processing (eg, searching) can be performed on the outsourced data. Searchable Encryption (SE) techniques have been widely studied to enable searching on the data while they are encrypted. These techniques enable various types of search on the encrypted data and offer different levels of security. While these techniques enable different search types and vary in details, they share similarities in their components and architectures. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on different secure search techniques, a high‐level architecture for these systems, and an analysis of their performance and security level.