Recent developments in searching over encrypted cloud data

Abstract

Cloud Storage is currently one of the most widely used applications of cloud. As usage of cloud is increasing, critical and personal data is also being outsourced making it important to maintain confidentiality and integrity of this data. A basic way of protecting data is encrypting it before outsourcing, but the retrieval of required files from the encrypted cloud becomes a problem which requires searching over the encrypted data. Various schemes have been proposed to deal with this issue of searching over encrypted cloud data, and work continues to advance attempting to provide optimum user search experience resembling plaintext search. This paper reviews research in this field ranging from single keyword to multi-keyword search, forward indexing to reverse indexing, and disjunctive to conjunctive multi-keyword search. As research in this space is growing soon with target of making user search experience over encrypted data resemble plain text search experience (such as “Google Search”).