A hybrid searchable encryption scheme for cloud computing

Abstract

With the advances of technology, large amount of data is generated daily, which makes the traditional systems not to be able to handle such large quantities of data. A natural upgrade is to move to the cloud. In the last few years this was a trend adopted by an increasing number of organizations. Even an individual user uses the cloud in form of software as a service, for example, Google Drive, Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon Elastic Cloud etc. Also, a new trend is that smartphone manufacturers to provide a limited cloud storage in their own cloud for every user, storage used for data back-up or data storage. Extending the idea, an organization has much more data than an individual user and moving them to the cloud could be an advantage. But an organization or even an individual have sensitive documents stored on cloud and cloud computing brings many security challenges. A response to these challenges is searchable encryption, which allows searching for encrypted keywords over encrypted data on a server. In this paper, we propose a searchable encryption scheme, based on word suffix tree, in which we use two different algorithms to encrypt the keywords and documents.