Efficient and Secure Search over Encrypted Data

Due to a variety of crucial benefits, enterprises outsource their data to cloud resident storage. If the outsourced data is stored as plaintext on remote servers then it may be intercepted by adversaries. Hence, data is stored in encrypted form on remote servers. However, if the client has to decrypt the data in order to get results for a search query, it defeats the purpose of outsourcing data.

Generic tools such as fully homomorphic encryption or oblivious RAM can be considered to construct protocols that leak almost no information to the server. But as of now, these tools are costly for large databases and hence, are impractical. A practical solution to this problem is Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) schemes that trade efficiency for security. The focus of our research in this area is to build efficient and secure dynamic searchable encryption scheme, protocol for wildcard search over encrypted data etc.