Selective document retrieval from encrypted database

Abstract

We propose the concept of selective document retrieval (SDR) from an encrypted database which allows a client to store encrypted data on a third-party server and perform efficient search remotely. We propose a new SDR scheme based on the recent advances in fully homomorphic encryption schemes. The proposed scheme is secure in our security model and can be adapted to support many useful search features, including aggregating search results, supporting conjunctive keyword search queries, advanced keyword search, search with keyword occurrence frequency, and search based on inner product. To evaluate the performance, we implement the search algorithm of our scheme in C. The experiment results show that a search query takes only 47 seconds in an encrypted database with 1000 documents on a Linux server, and it demonstrates that our scheme is much more efficient, i.e., around 1250 times faster, than a solution based on the SSW scheme with similar security guarantees. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.