Secure multi-keyword search supporting dynamic update and ranked retrieval

As cloud computing is becoming prevalent, data owners are motivated to delegate complex data managements to the commercial cloud for economic savings. Sensitive data is usually encrypted before being uploaded to the cloud, which unfortunately makes the frequently-used search function a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a new multi-keyword dynamic search scheme with result ranking to make search over encrypted data more secure and practical. In the scheme, we employ a powerful function-hiding inner product encryption to enhance the security by preventing the leakage of search pattern. For the concern of efficiency, we adopt a tree-based index structure to facilitate the searching process and updating operations. A comprehensive security analysis is provided and experiments over the real world data show that our scheme is efficient.