Privacy-Preserving Cloud Database Querying

Yanbin Lu and Gene Tsudik

Information and Computer Science

Bren Hall, 3rd Floor

University of California, Irvine

Irvine CA 92697-3435, USA

{yanbinl, gts}@uci.edu

Abstract

Due to its low cost, robustness, flexibility and ubiquitous nature, cloud computing is changing the

way entities manage their data. However, various privacy concerns arise whenever potentially sensitive

data is outsourced to the cloud.

This paper presents a novel approach for coping with such privacy concerns. The proposed

scheme prevents the cloud server from learning any possibly sensitive plaintext in the outsourced

databases. It also allows the database owner to delegate users to conducting content-level fine-grained

private search and decryption. Moreover, our scheme supports private querying whereby neither the

database owner nor the cloud server learns query details. Additional requirement that user’s input be

authorized by CA can also be supported.

Keywords: Privacy, Database, Cloud Computing, Attribute-based Encryption