Computing on encrypted character strings in clouds

Abstract

Many organizations today are turning towards the contemporary concept of Cloud Computing, which entails the transfer of their applications (processing both sensitive and non-sensitive data) into online repositories or clouds. Encryption schemes based on homomorphic functions can provide the technology required to protect the confidentiality of this data. Their limitation, however, lies in their ability to process numeric values only. This paper, therefore, is focused on proposing a new encryption scheme relying on character string splitting and ciphering with additional components on the user and cloud side to support querying and modifying character string functions. Ultimately, what eventuates is an environment where a cloud is unaware of the contents of any input character strings, and of the output data during processing. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.