Towards Multi-user Private Keyword Search for Cloud Computing

Working in various service models ranging from SaaS, PaaS, to IaaS, cloud computing is viewed by many as anew revolution in IT, and could reshape the paradigm of how IT industry works today. Storage services are a fundamental function offered by cloud computing. A typical use scenario of the cloud storage services is that an enterprise outsources its database to the cloud and authorizes multiple users to access the database. In such cases of database outsourcing, data encryption is a good approach enabling the data owner to retain its control over the outsourced data. {\em Searchable encryption} is a cryptographic primitive allowing for private keyword based search over the encrypted database. The above setting of enterprise outsourcing database to the cloud requires multi-user searchable encryption, whereas virtually all existing schemes consider the single-user setting. To bridge this gap, we are motivated to propose a practical multi-user searchable encryption scheme, which has a number of advantages over the known approaches. The associated model and security requirements are also formulated.