Secure Encrypted Image Search in Mobile Cloud Computing

Abstract

Mobile could computing is an area of cloud computing which considers resource constrained devices. Therefore there naturally appears a new design goal which is efficiency of mobile client applications. In this paper we consider encrypted image search schemes. In particular, we design a scheme for which distances between encrypted images are close to distances between images in plaintexts, which allows for more efficient search mechanisms. At the same time, this scheme can ensure privacy of image content. Previous solutions achieve this goal by exploiting homomorphic encryption schemes, which are far to inefficient and hard to realize on the resource constrained mobile devices. In this paper, we introduce a novel encryption search scheme for CBIR (Content-Based Image Retrieval) by using comparable encryption. Our scheme greatly reduces the amount of computation on the client side, and improves the distance consistency and precision of fuzzy search, compared to previous solutions.