An efficient privacy-preserving multi-keyword search over encrypted cloud data with ranking

Information search and retrieval from a remote database (e.g., cloud server) involves a multitude of privacy issues. Submitted search terms and their frequencies, returned responses and order of their relevance, and retrieved data items may contain sensitive information about the users. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-keyword search scheme that ensures users' privacy against both external adversaries including other authorized users and cloud server itself. The proposed scheme uses cryptographic techniques as well as query and response randomization. Provided that the security and randomization parameters are appropriately chosen, both search terms in queries and returned responses are protected against privacy violations. The scheme implements strict security and privacy requirements that essentially disallow linking queries featuring identical search terms. We also incorporate an effective ranking capability in the scheme that enables user to retrieve only the top matching results. Our comprehensive analytical study and extensive experiments using both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed scheme is privacy-preserving, effective, and highly efficient.