Survey on Secure Search Over Encrypted Data on the Cloud
It addresses the problem of enabling secure data processing for cloud users by reviewing existing methods, but it is incremental as it synthesizes prior work without introducing new techniques.
This paper provides a comprehensive survey on searchable encryption techniques that enable secure searching over encrypted data in the cloud, analyzing their performance and security levels to address user concerns about data privacy.
Cloud computing has become a potential resource for businesses and individuals to outsource their data to remote but highly accessible servers. However, potentials of the cloud services have not been fully unleashed due to users' concerns about security and privacy of their data in the cloud. User-side encryption techniques can be employed to mitigate the security concerns. Nonetheless, once the data in encrypted, no processing (e.g., 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. In addition, although 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.