Practical Techniques for Searches on Encrypted Data

It is desirable to store data on data storage servers such as mail servers and file servers in encrypted form to reduce security and privacy risks. But this usually implies that one has to sacrifice functionality for security. For example, if a client wishes to retrieve only documents containing certain words, it was not previously known how to let the data storage server perform the search and answer the query without loss of data confidentiality. In this paper, we describe our cryptographic schemes for the problem of searching on encrypted data and provide proofs of security for the resulting crypto systems. Our techniques have a number of crucial advantages. They are provably secure: they provide provable secrecy for encryption, in the sense that the untrusted server cannot learn anything about the plaintext when only given the ciphertext; they provide query isolation for searches, meaning that the untrusted server cannot learn anything more about the plaintext than the search r...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: SP
• Authors: Dawn Xiaodong Song, David Wagner, Adrian Perrig
• Keywords: Data Storage Server, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Security Privacy, SP 2000, Untrusted Server