A privacy protection approach for XML-based archives management in a cloud environment

Purpose The security of archival privacy data in the cloud has become the main obstacle to the application of cloud computing in archives management. To this end, aiming at XML archives, this paper aims to present a privacy protection approach that can ensure the security of privacy data in the untrusted cloud, without compromising the system availability. Design/methodology/approach The basic idea of the approach is as follows. First, the privacy data before being submitted to the cloud should be strictly encrypted on a trusted client to ensure the security. Then, to query the encrypted data efficiently, the approach constructs some key feature data for the encrypted data, so that each XML query defined on the privacy data can be executed correctly in the cloud. Findings Finally, both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate the overall performance of the approach in terms of security, efficiency and accuracy. Originality/value This paper presents a valuable study attempting to protect privacy for the management of XML archives in a cloud environment, so it has a positive significance to promote the application of cloud computing in a digital archive system.