Semantic Search Over Encrypted Data

Searchable encryption is a promising primitive in the context of outsourced data storage and in particular cloud computing. Current constructions lack searching capabilities beyond exact search on keywords and are thus less efficient than plaintext algorithm that take into account the meaning and return results corresponding to semantically close keywords. We thus advocate for the need of semantic search over encrypted data. We study the state of the art in stemming algorithms and in searchable encryption and propose the first semantic symmetric searchable encryption constructions. This improvement over searchable encryption has similar security as the prior work of Curtmola et al. on symmetric searchable encryption.