Partial order preserving encryption search trees

Abstract

As Internet services expand and proliferate, service users’ data show an increase in volume as well as geographical dispersion mainly due to the large number of personalized services that users often access today on a daily basis. This fact, however, presents a user privacy and user data security challenge for service providers: how to protect theirs users’ data from unauthorized access. In this paper we present a new tree-based data structure for storing encrypted information in order to support fast search, update, and delete operations on the encrypted data. The data structure relies on exposing limited ordering information of the data in order to locate them fast. After showing that a totally order preserving encryption scheme is not secure, we describe a new tree data structure and assess its security and efficiency.