Fuzzy keywords enabled ranked searchable encryption scheme for a public Cloud environment

摘要

Searchable Encryption allows a user or organization to outsource their encrypted documents to a Cloud-based storage service, while maintaining the ability to perform keyword searches over the encrypted text. However, most of the existing search schemes do not take the almost certain presence of typographical errors in the documents under consideration, when trying to obtain meaningful and accurate results. This paper presents a novel ranked searchable encryption scheme that addresses this issue by supporting fuzzy keywords. The proposed construction is based on probabilistic trapdoors that help resist distinguishability attacks. This paper for the first time proposes Searchable Encryption as a Service (SEaaS). The proposed construction is deployed on the British Telecommunication's public Cloud architecture and evaluated over a real-life speech corpus. Our security analysis yields that the construction satisfies strong security guarantees and is also quiet lightweight, by analyzing its performance over the speech corpus.