Privacy-Preserving k-Nearest Neighbor Computation in Multiple Cloud Environments

With the advent of big data era, clients lack of computational and storage resources tends to outsource data mining tasks to cloud computing providers in order to improve efficiency and save costs. Generally, different clients choose different cloud companies for the sake of security, business cooperation, location, and so on. However, due to the rise of privacy leakage issues, the data contributed by clients should be encrypted under their own keys. This paper focuses on privacy-preserving k-nearest neighbor (kNN) computation over the databases distributed among multiple cloud environments. Unfortunately, existing secure outsourcing protocols are either restricted to a single key setting or quite inefficient because of frequent client-to-server interactions, making it impractical for wide application. To address these issues, we propose a set of secure building blocks and outsourced collaborative kNN protocol. Theoretical analysis shows that our scheme not only preserves the privacy of distributed databases and kNN query but also hides access patterns in the semi-honest model. Experimental evaluation demonstrates its significant efficiency improvements compared with existing methods.