Efficient Approximate Search Using VGRAM Over Encrypted Cloud Data

As Cloud Computing becomes popular, most data owners want to outsource their data into the cloud. For security, the data needs to be encrypted. However, traditional encryption schemes obsolete most applications over encrypted data such as data searching. One solution is searchable encryption which allows a client to search over encrypted data. One hand, many researchers focus on exact searchable encryption schemes. Approximate search, on the other hand, is more practical since it allows minor typos in query words. In this paper, we present a new efficient and secure scheme to support approximate search. The main idea is to reduce the edit distance between two keywords to Hamming distance between their Bloom filters using the technique of VGRAM. To the best of our knowledge, our scheme is the first to utilize the VGRAM technique into searchable encryption. Our experiments show that the new scheme is more efficient than previous approximate searchable schemes especially in term of storage.