Privacy Preserving Ranked Multi-Keyword Search for Multiple Data Owners in Cloud Computing

With the advent of cloud computing, it has become increasingly popular for data owners to outsource their data to public cloud servers while allowing data users to retrieve this data. For privacy concerns, secure searches over encrypted cloud data has motivated several research works under the single owner model. However, most cloud servers in practice do not just serve one owner; instead, they support multiple owners to share the benefits brought by cloud computing. In this paper, we propose schemes to deal with privacy preserving ranked multi-keyword search in a multi-owner model (PRMSM). To enable cloud servers to perform secure search without knowing the actual data of both keywords and trapdoors, we systematically construct a novel secure search protocol. To rank the search results and preserve the privacy of relevance scores between keywords and files, we propose a novel additive order and privacy preserving function family. To prevent the attackers from eavesdropping secret keys and pretending to be legal data users submitting searches, we propose a novel dynamic secret key generation protocol and a new data user authentication protocol. Furthermore, PRMSM supports efficient data user revocation. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets confirm the efficacy and efficiency of PRMSM.