Privacy-preserving data utilization in hybrid clouds

As cloud computing becomes prevalent, more and more sensitive data is being centralized into the cloud, which raises a new challenge on how to utilize the outsourced data in a privacy-preserving manner. Although searchable encryption allows for privacy-preserving keyword search over encrypted data, it could not work effectively for restricting unauthorized access to the outsourced private data. In this paper, aiming at tackling the challenge of privacy-preserving utilization of data in cloud computing, we propose a practical hybrid architecture in which a private cloud is introduced as an access interface between the data owner/user and the public cloud. Under this architecture, a data utilization system is provided to achieve both exact keyword search and fine-grained access control over encrypted data. Security and efficiency analysis for the proposed system are presented in detail. Then, further enhancements for this system are considered in two steps. (1) We show how to extend our system to support efficient fuzzy keyword search while overcoming the disadvantage of insignificant decryption in the existing privacy-preserving fuzzy keyword search scheme. (2) We demonstrate approaches to realize an outsourcing cryptographic access control mechanism and further reduce the computational cost at the data user side. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.