Fuzzy keyword search over encrypted data in cloud computing

Abstract

As Cloud Computing becomes prevalent, more and more sensitive information are being centralized into the cloud. For the protection of data privacy, sensitive data usually have to be encrypted before outsourcing, which makes effective data utilization a very challenging task. Although traditional searchable encryption schemes allow a user to securely search over encrypted data through keywords and selectively retrieve files of interest, these techniques support only exact keyword search. This significant drawback makes existing techniques unsuitable in cloud computing as it is greatly affect system usability, rendering user searching experiences very frustrating and system efficiency very low. In this paper, for the first time we formalize and solve the problem of effective fuzzy keyword search over encrypted cloud while maintaining keyword privacy. In our solution, we exploit edit distance to quantify keyword similarity and develop new advanced technique on constructing fuzzy keyword sets which greatly reduces the storage and representation overheads. In this way, we show that our proposed solution is secure and privacy preserving, while realizing the goal of fuzzy keyword search.