Towards Multi-user Private Keyword Search for Cloud Computing

Storage-as-a-service is an essential component of the cloud computing infrastructure. Database outsourcing is a typical use scenario of the cloud storage services, wherein data encryption is a good approach enabling the data owner to retain its control over the outsourced data. Searchable encryption is a cryptographic primitive allowing for private keyword based search over the encrypted database. The setting of enterprise outsourcing database to the cloud requires multi-user searchable encryption, whereas virtually all existing schemes consider the single-user setting. To bridge this gap, we propose a practical multi-user searchable encryption scheme, which has a number of advantages over the known approaches.