Effective Error-Tolerant Keyword Search for Secure Cloud Computing

The existing solutions to keyword search in the cloud can be divided into two categories: searching on exact keywords and searching on error-tolerant keywords. An error-tolerant keyword search scheme permits to make searches on encrypted data with only an approximation of some keyword. The scheme is suitable to the case where users' searching input might not exactly match those pre-set keywords. In this paper, we first present a general framework for searching on error-tolerant keywords. Then we propose a concrete scheme, based on a fuzzy extractor, which is proved secure against an adaptive adversary under well-defined security definition. The scheme is suitable for all similarity metrics including Hamming distance, edit distance, and set difference. It does not require the user to construct or store anything in advance, other than the key used to calculate the trapdoor of keywords and the key to encrypt data documents. Thus, our scheme tremendously eases the users' burden. What is more, our scheme is able to transform the servers' searching for error-tolerant keywords on ciphertexts to the searching for exact keywords on plaintexts. The server can use any existing approaches of exact keywords search to search plaintexts on an index table.