Achieving effective cloud search services: multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted cloud data supporting synonym query

In recent years, consumer-centric cloud computing paradigm has emerged as the development of smart electronic devices combined with the emerging cloud computing technologies. A variety of cloud services are delivered to the consumers with the premise that an effective and efficient cloud search service is achieved. For consumers, they want to find the most relevant products or data, which is highly desirable in the "pay-as-you use" cloud computing paradigm. As sensitive data (such as photo albums, emails, personal health records, financial records, etc.) are encrypted before outsourcing to cloud, traditional keyword search techniques are useless. Meanwhile, existing search approaches over encrypted cloud data support only exact or fuzzy keyword search, but not semantics-based multi-keyword ranked search. Therefore, how to enable an effective searchable system with support of ranked search remains a very challenging problem. This paper proposes an effective approach to solve the problem of multi-keyword ranked search over encrypted cloud data supporting synonym queries. The main contribution of this paper is summarized in two aspects: multi-keyword ranked search to achieve more accurate search results and synonym-based search to support synonym queries. Extensive experiments on real-world dataset were performed to validate the approach, showing that the proposed solution is very effective and efficient for multikeyword ranked searching in a cloud environment.