Search Ranges Efficiently and Compatibly as Keywords over Encrypted Data

With recent studies in Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE), a client can efficiently perform keyword queries over its outsourced data on a remote but untrusted server (e.g., a public cloud), and correctly retrieve associated files without revealing the confidentiality of his/her data. Besides keyword search, many recent schemes also studied range queries on encrypted data, where range search is also one of the most extensively used queries in databases and information retrieval. However, most of these previous works supporting range search are neither efficient nor compatible with existing keyword SSE schemes. In this paper, we propose two range SSE schemes to enable range queries on encrypted data. Both of our schemes are not only efficient, but also highly compatible with existing keyword SSE schemes. Specifically, the search time of our first scheme is extremely efficient when the values in a range query are sparsely presenting in a dataset; while our second design can achieve an optimal token size and significantly save token generation costs. Moreover, we rigorously define and analyze the security of our schemes, and also conduct extensive experiments with a real dataset to demonstrate the performance of our schemes.