Privacy Preserving Keyword Searches on Remote Encrypted Data

Yan-Cheng Chang; Michael Mitzenmacher

Paper 2004/051

Privacy Preserving Keyword Searches on Remote Encrypted Data

Yan-Cheng Chang and Michael Mitzenmacher

Abstract

We consider the following problem: a user \U\ wants to store his files in an encrypted form on a remote file server \FS. Later the user \U\ wants to efficiently retrieve some of the encrypted files containing (or indexed by) specific keywords, keeping the keywords themselves secret and not jeopardizing the security of the remotely stored files. For example, a user may want to store old e-mail messages encrypted on a server managed by Yahoo or another large vendor, and later retrieve certain messages while traveling with a mobile device. In this paper, we offer solutions for this problem under well-defined security requirements. Our schemes are efficient in the sense that no public-key cryptosystem is involved. Indeed, our approach is independent of the encryption method chosen for the remote files. They are also incremental, in that \U\ can submit new files which are totally secure against previous queries but still searchable against future queries.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF PS
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Unknown where it was published
Contact author(s): ycchang @ eecs harvard edu
History: 2004-03-03: last of 5 revisions; 2004-02-21: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2004/051
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2004/051,
      author = {Yan-Cheng Chang and Michael Mitzenmacher},
      title = {Privacy Preserving Keyword Searches on Remote Encrypted Data},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2004/051},
      year = {2004},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2004/051}
}