Secure Searchable Encryption and Data Management

Book excerpt: With the advent of the IT revolution, the volume of data produced has increased exponentially and is still showing an upward trend. This data may be abundant and enormous, but it’s a precious resource and should be managed properly. Cloud technology plays an important role in data management. Storing data in the cloud rather than on local storage has many benefits, but apart from these benefits, there are privacy concerns in storing sensitive data over third-party servers. These concerns can be addressed by storing data in an encrypted form; however, while encryption solves the problem of privacy, it engenders other serious issues, including the infeasibility of the fundamental search operation and a reduction in flexibility when sharing data with other users, amongst others. The concept of searchable encryption addresses these issues. This book provides every necessary detail required to develop a secure, searchable encryption scheme using both symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic primitives along with the appropriate security models to ensure the minimum security requirements for real-world applications.