Towards a Practical and Efficient Search over Encrypted Data in the Cloud

Searchable encryption allows a client to encrypt its document collection in such a way that the encrypted collection can still be searched. The most immediate application of searchable encryption is privacy / confidentiality preserving cloud storage, where it enables a client to securely outsource its document collection to an untrusted cloud provider without sacrificing the ability to search over it. Our research focuses on developing a novel searchable encryption framework that allows the cloud server to perform multi-keyword ranked search as well as substring search incorporating position information. We present some advances that we have accomplished in this area. We then layout our planned research work and a timeline to accomplish this.