Answering queries using pairings
This addresses data confidentiality for users outsourcing data to cloud storage, but it is incremental as it applies an existing cryptographic method to a specific use case.
The paper tackles the problem of querying encrypted data stored in untrusted cloud environments by applying an attribute-based cryptographic scheme, demonstrating feasibility through implementation with a real-world RDBMS and experimental results.
Outsourcing data in the cloud has become nowadays very common. Since -- generally speaking -- cloud data storage and management providers cannot be fully trusted, mechanisms providing the confidentiality of the stored data are necessary. A possible solution is to encrypt all the data, but -- of course -- this poses serious problems about the effective usefulness of the stored data. In this work, we propose to apply a well-known attribute-based cryptographic scheme to cope with the problem of querying encrypted data. We have implemented the proposed scheme with a real-world, off-the-shelf RDBMS and we provide several experimental results showing the feasibility of our approach.