Approaches and challenges of privacy preserving search over encrypted data

More and more data owners are encouraged to outsource their data onto cloud servers for reducing infrastructure, maintenance cost and also to get ubiquitous access to their stored data. However, security is one issue that discourages data owners from adopting cloud servers for data storage. Searchable Encryption (SE) is one of the few ways of assuring privacy and confidentiality of such data by storing them in encrypted form at the cloud servers. SE enables the data owners and users to search over encrypted data through trapdoors. Most of the user information requirements are fulfilled either through Boolean or Ranked search approaches. This paper aims at understanding how the confidentiality and privacy of information can be guaranteed while processing single and multi-keyword queries over encrypted data using Boolean and Ranked search approaches. This paper presents all possible leakages that happen in SE and also specifies which privacy preserving approach to be adopted in SE schemes to prevent those leakages to help the practitioners and researchers to design and implement secure searchable encryption systems. It also highlights various application scenarios where SE could be utilized. This paper also explores the research challenges and open problems that need to be focused in future. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.