TSED: Top-k ranked searchable encryption for secure cloud data storage

Abstract

With the proliferation of data and appealing features of cloud storage, a large amount of data are outsourced to the public cloud. To ensure privacy of sensitive data and defend against unauthorized access, data owners encrypt the data. Therefore, it is essential to build efficient and secure searchable encryption techniques. In this paper, we address two problems. Firstly, most of the existing work uses inverted index for faster retrieval; however, inverted index is not inherently dynamic. Secondly, due to a large amount of data and on-demand users, secure and efficient ranked retrieval sorted by relevance is desired especially in the pay-as-you-use cloud model. In this paper, we construct TSED: top-k ranked searchable encryption for secure cloud data storage. TSED uses a dynamic and secure index using homomorphic encryption and efficient ranked retrieval. Performance analysis on real-world dataset shows that TSED is efficient and practical.