Secure and Efficient Similarity Retrieval in Cloud Computing Based on Homomorphic Encryption

With the rapid development of cloud computing, massive amounts of data are uploaded to cloud servers for storage. For privacy protection, sensitive data should be encrypted before outsourcing, and ciphertext retrieval technologies based on similarity come into being. In cloud computing with massive data, the efficiency and accuracy of retrieval are crucial. However, most of the current similarity retrieval schemes do not perform well in these two aspects. Therefore, we propose SESR scheme, a secure and efficient similarity retrieval scheme based on homomorphic encryption. Firstly, we use Hamming distance to calculate the similarity between the feature vector of the data and query vector from the data user. Secondly, the homomorphic encryption algorithm is used to encrypt data to protect data privacy. Furthermore, we creatively design a BK-KD tree structure that hierarchically implements similarity search and fine-grained access control, thereby speeding up the retrieval efficiency. In addition, we design a two-cloud-server cooperative retrieval model and a message authentication scheme, which ensure access pattern privacy security and the integrity of the transmitted data simultaneously. We also propose an improved SESR scheme. In this scheme, we use Simhash algorithm to generate feature vectors and query vectors, which reduces storage overhead. Finally, the security of SESR is formally proved and the simulation results show the efficiency and accuracy of the retrieval scheme.