Encrypted phrase searching in the cloud

As cloud computing is increasing in popularity, it is difficult to both maintain privacy in datasets while still providing adequate retrieval and searching procedures. This paper introduces a novel approach in the field of encrypted searching that allows both encrypted phrase searches and proximity ranked multi-keyword searches to encrypted datasets on untrusted cloud. By storing encrypted keyword-location data along with specially truncated encrypted keyword indexes in a relational database, we are able to allow for a full range of search features in our encrypted searches, something that has never been accomplished before. Furthermore, our approach permits the encrypted corpus and index to both be stored on cloud data servers. We modify currently available open-source search engine software to complete a prototype and provide results from experiments on a large scale real-world dataset that has more than half a million documents.