Data security is well-recognized a vital issue in an information system that is supported in an outsource environment. However, most of conventional XML encryption proposals treat confidential parts of an XML document as whole blocks of text and apply encryption algorithms directly on them. As a result, queries involving the encrypted part cannot be efficiently processed. In order to address these problems, we propose XQEnc, a novel approach to support querying encrypted XML. XQEnc is based on two important techniques of vectorization and skeleton compression. Essentially, vectorization, which is a generalization of columns of a relational table, makes use the basic path of an XML tree to label the data values. Skeleton compression collapses the redundant paths into a multiplicity attribute. Our analysis and experimental study shows that XQEnc achieves both better query efficiency and more robust security compared with conventional methods. As an application, we show how XQEnc can be realized with relational techniques to enable secure XML data outsourcing.
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