Domain Dictionary-Based Metadata Construction for Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data

Abstract

With the massive increase in the amount of data generated every day and with the advent of the modern technology, cloud storage has become a need of the hour. Advancements in cloud computing led the data owners to outsource their intensive data to cloud servers like Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google Drive, and so on. Cloud storage services permit users to store and/or accession of data in a cloud; irrespective of the time and geographical locations, in an on-demand basis using any device. However, entrusting the cloud service provider with the sensitive data raises the underlying security and privacy issues. In order to provide confidentiality, data are encrypted before safekeeping it on the cloud service provider (CSP). Although the encryption approach does strengthen the data security, it consequently effects the various operations to be performed on the data, most significant being data searching and retrieval. Various searchable encryption schemes are developed for search over outsourced encrypted data. Mostly these schemes perform index-based ranked search and employ frequency of search keyword in the document; hence, challenging the security and reducing efficiency. In this paper, we present a domain dictionary-based index generation scheme for search over encrypted data. We have proposed a novel concept of domain dictionary wherefrom a metadata-based index file is to be generated that is to be queried while performing searching operations.