A Pilot Investigation on Enabling Privacy-assured and Versatile Search for Cloud Data

Cloud Computing economically enables a fundamental paradigm shift on how data services are deployed and delivered, i.e., data outsourcing. As a result, cloud is serving as a natural hub hosting massive data continuously generated by the Internet and social media, which take various forms, e.g., text, picture, multimedia, etc. While the merits of cloud services can be easily understood, their security and privacy risks still largely remain a challenge. For the data that are congregated in the cloud, they might include sensitive personal, business, and organizational information, whose nature prohibits their uncontrolled access. Although data encryption before outsourcing helps protecting data confidentiality, it also makes effective data search and retrieval a very challenging task.This proposal aims to initiate the investigation of this challenging task by developing effective yet versatile searching techniques over encrypted cloud data of massive scale. Such techniques should enable critical search functionalities that have long been enjoyed in modern search engine over unencrypted data, like Google, Bing, etc. The adequacy of such techniques is essential to the long-term success of the cloud services and the ultimate privacy protection of both individuals and organizations.