Searching Private Data in a Cloud Encrypted Domain

Cloud computing security and reliability are important challenges in the research agenda. For some applications managing sensitive data, cloud security solutions and data-privacy management are the main concerns for organizations that are considering a move to the cloud. The advantages of cloud computing include reduced costs, easy maintenance and re-provisioning of resources, thereby also possibly increasing profits. But the adoption of Cloud Computing solutions applies only if different security concerns are ensured. This article presents a solution for data storage and data management in Internet Storage Clouds, preserving privacy conditions under the control of Cloud users. The proposed solution supports operations over stored encrypted data, including reading, writing and searching based on relevance ranking and multiple keywords. The approach is based on a middleware architecture supported by homomorphic encryption techniques combined with dynamic indexing mechanisms. The solution preserves data-privacy without need to either decipher data during operations in the Cloud or transfer the data during searches. The article further describes an implementation prototype of the solution and its evaluation. The evaluation shows that the solution is viable, offers security and privacy control for the user and does not aggravate conditions of data-access latency and availability.