Design and implementation of multi-user secure indices for encrypted cloud storage

Cloud storage is one of the most rapidly growing cloud services, which at the same time also faces serious security challenges. Recently, several cloud-storage service providers started to provide encryption protection to client data in the cloud. However, encryption imposes significant limits on data use. In this paper, we report our design and implementation of an encrypted cloud storage system that supports multi-user secure indices, allowing efficient search among encrypted documents of multiple users. Experiment results show that keyword search can be performed in real time. We believe that our system represent a first step toward providing secure and useful cloud-storage services in practice.