A privacy-preserving top-k query processing algorithm in the cloud computing

Abstract

Cloud computing has emerged as a new platform for storing and managing databases. As a result, a database outsourcing paradigm has gained much interests. To prevent the contents of outsourced databases from being revealed to cloud computing, databases must be encrypted before being outsourced to the cloud. Therefore, various Top-k query processing techniques have been proposed for encrypted databases. However, there is no existing work that can not only hide data access patterns, but also preserve the privacy of user query. To solve the problems, in this paper, we propose a new privacypreserving Top-k query processing algorithm. Our algorithm protects the user query from the cloud and conceals data access patterns during query processing. A performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme provide good scalability without any information leakage.