Secure Search of Private Documents in an Enterprise Content Management System

An enterprise content management system such as an electronic contract system manages a large number of secure documents for many organizations. The search of these private documents for different organizational users with role- based access control is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a novel content-based XML-annotated secure-index search mechanism that provides an effective search and retrieval of private documents with document-level security. The search mechanism includes a document analysis framework for text analysis and annotation, a search indexer to build and incorporate document access control information directly into a search index, an XML-based search engine, and a compound query generation technique to join user role and organization information into search query. Our experiments on a pilot electronic contract system demonstrate that, by incorporating document access information directly into the search index and combining user information in the search query, search and retrieval of private contract documents can be achieved very effectively and securely with high performance.