Adding security to compressed information retrieval systems

Abstract

Word-based Huffman coding has widespread use in information retrieval systems. Besides its compressing power, it also enables the implementation of both indexing and searching schema in the compressed file. In this work, an algorithm that adds securiry to compressed data is proposed. It shows a small loss in coding, decoding and compression performances. The algorithm uses homophonic substitution, canonical Huffman codes and a secret key for enciphering.