International Journal of Computer Systems (ISSN: 2394-1065), Volume 03 Issue 02, February, 2016

Available at http://www.ijcsonline.com/

Multi Keyword Ranked Search Enabled Encryption on Cloud Data

Vishnuprasad T., Ajith Kumar K. and Abhiram C. M.
Department of CSE, Nehru College of Engineering and Research Centre, Pampady, Thrissur, India

Abstract
Since the growth of internet technology become explosive, so does the growth of cloud technology. Virtually the cloud
technology is improving every day in these days. Along with this rapid improvement, cloud computing is also having
great flexibility and cost effectiveness. These features of cloud lure every data owners to share and upload the data and
information into a cloud network. But for privacy and security needs, they encrypt it before uploading. Hence searching
for the encrypted data in the cloud is necessary in these days. There exist techniques for searching encrypted data,
namely single keyword and Boolean keyword search. But as there is large number of data in the cloud and the number of
users using it is also large, these techniques for searching and retrieving encrypted cloud data arent sufficient. Because
the result obtained through these techniques cant satisfy a hungry user. For these reasons the need of introducing new
searching scheme called multi keyword ranked searching is necessary. The multi keyword searching scheme establishes
a set of strict privacy requirement for a secure cloud data utilization system. It also ensures that the proposed scheme
surely bring in reduced overhead on communication as well as in computation.
Keywords: Multi keyword search, ranked search, cloud computing, searchable encryption, ranked search

I.

INTRODUCTION

One of the most innovative internet technology in the

twenty first century is cloud computing. This is because of
the reason that it realizes the vision of computing as a
utility. It allows customers to stores the data in the cloud so
as to enjoy the on-demand high quality applications from a
shared pool of configurable virtualized resources. The
driving force for both individuals and enterprises to
outsource their local complex data management system
into the cloud is because of its flexibility and economic
saving feature. All organisations have the responsibility to
provide security to its users data, and for privacy they will
have to block unsolicited accesses to the cloud. For this the
sensitive data have to be encrypted by data owners before
outsourcing to the commercial public cloud. This, however,
obsoletes the traditional data utilization service based on
plaintext keyword search. Downloading all data and
decrypting locally is a trivial solution and is highly
impractical. All these reasons sum up the want for a
scheme that allow multi keyword search on encrypted
cloud data along with essential data secrecy features.
Since the users requirement is to get the data that they
request as fast as possible and as accurately as possible, it
demands the cloud server to perform result relevance
ranking, instead of returning undifferentiated results [2]. It
not only retrieves the data that user desires quickly but can
also eliminate unnecessary network traffic. This because
the cloud is based on the concept of pay as you use and
hence nobody wants to waste the money unnecessarily. For
the ranking of result to be effective, it solidifies the need
for multi keyword searching schemes. However, how to
apply it in the encrypted cloud data search system remains
a very challenging task because of inherent security and
privacy obstacles, including various strict requirements like
the data privacy, the index privacy, the keyword privacy,
and many others.

For encrypted data in cloud, searchable encryption is a

helpful technique that treats encrypted data as documents.
This allows a user to easily and securely search by using a
single keyword and retrieve documents of interest [3].But
since they are developed as cryptoprimitives and cannot
accommodate high service-level requirements like system
usability, efficient user searching experience and easy
information retrieval. To improve the search flexibility,
some recent designs have been proposed to support
Boolean keyword search [4]. But they are still not enough
to provide users with acceptable result ranking
functionality. Having said all this, the new scheme of multi
keyword searching on an encrypted data is still a major
challenge.
In this paper, the scheme named multi keyword ranked
search (MKRS) enabled encryption on cloud data is
specified and resolved. In the several semantics available
for multi keyword searching co-ordinate matching is
used here. When the index construction is carried out, each
document is associated with a binary vector as a sub-index
where each bit represents whether corresponding keyword
is contained in the document. The search query is also
described as a binary vector where each bit means whether
corresponding keyword appears in this search request, so
the similarity could be exactly measured by the inner
product of the query vector with the data vector. But
outsourcing of the data vector or the query vector directly
will violate the index privacy or the search privacy. For
taking on challenges of supporting such multikeyword
semantic without privacy breaches, a basic idea for the
MKRS using secure inner product computation is
considered. This is adapted from secure k-nearest
neighbour (kNN) technique [5].

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Vishnuprasad T, Ajith Kumar K, Abhiram C M

Multi Keyword Ranked Search Enabled Encryption on Cloud Data

Chosen-cipher text model. By this model it means that,

as the cloud server knows encrypted data set C and index I,
the cloud server because of its curious nature can choose
arbitrary cipher text and have access to plaintext decrypted
from it.
Known background model. In this stronger model, the
cloud server is supposed to possess more knowledge than
what can be accessed in the known cipher text model. Such
information may include the correlation relationship of
given search requests (trapdoors), as well as the data set
related statistical information.
Fig 1: Encrypted cloud data search architecture

II.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

A. The System Model

The system model can be considered as a cloud data
hosting service involving three different entities which is
illustrated in Fig 1.these entities are named as the data
owner, the data user, and the cloud server. This means the
system design uses the three-tier architecture. 'Three-tier' is
a client-server architecture in which the user interfaces,
functional process logic ("business rules"), computer data
storage and data access are developed and maintained as
independent modules, most often on separate platforms.
The three-tier model is considered to be software
architecture and a software design pattern.
The data owner has a set of data documents F to be
uploaded to the cloud server in the encrypted form C. To
enable the searching efficiency over C for adequate data
utilization, the data owner will first build an encrypted
searchable index I from F, and then outsource both the
index I and the encrypted document collection C to the
cloud server. To search the document collection for t given
keywords, an authorized user acquires a corresponding
trapdoor T through search control mechanisms. Upon
receiving T from a data user, the cloud server is obliged to
search the index I and return the corresponding set of
encrypted documents. To improve the document retrieval
accuracy, the search result should be ranked by the cloud
server according to any available ranking criteria.
B. Threat Models
We consider an honest-but-curious server in our
model, which is consistent with most of the previous
searchable encryption schemes [ ]. In most realistic
scenario the cloud server will act in honest manner. It
will also follow the designated protocols specified
correctly. But the concern for a semi-trusted server like this
is that, the server is always curious to infer and analyze
the message flow received during the protocol so as to
learn additional information. Specifically, the server, by no
means, has any willful intention to actively modify the
message flow or disrupt any other kind of services. By
these conclusions we have the following attacking models.
Known cipher text model. In this model, the cloud
server is supposed to only know encrypted data set C and
searchable index I, both of which are outsourced from the
data owner.

C. Design Goals
To enable ranked searchable symmetric encryption for
effective utilization of outsourced cloud data under the
aforementioned model, the design is intended to achieve
data secrecy and improved data retrieval. The goals are as
follows.
Multi-keyword ranked search. To design schemes
which allow multi-keyword query and provide
result similarity ranking for effective data retrieval,
instead of returning undifferentiated results.
Data secrecy. To keep the server from exposing
supplementary information from the data set and the
index, and to meet privacy requirements.
Performance. The precedent design goals are
expected to be achieved without diminishing the
performance of the system.
III.

LITERATURE SURVEY

Because of the large number of data users and

documents in the cloud, it has become a necessary to allow
multiple keywords in the search request and return
documents in the order of their relevance to these
keywords. The problem of multi keyword ranked search
over encrypted cloud data is explored, and then the
proposed system establishes a set of strict privacy
requirements for such a secure cloud data utilization
system. Experiments on the real-world data set further
shows that multi keyword ranked schemes indeed introduce
low overhead on computation and communication.
A. Towards a Cloud Definition,
Cloud Computing is associated with a new paradigm
for the provision of computing infrastructure [6]. This
paradigm shifts the location of this infrastructure to the
network to reduce the costs associated with the
management of hardware and software resources.
Depending on the type of provided capability, there are
three scenarios where Clouds are used: Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software
as a Service (SaaS).
Internet Providers manage a large set of computing
resources, such as storing and processing capacity.
Through virtualization, they are able to split, assign and
dynamically resize these resources to build ad-hoc systems
as demanded by customers, the SPs. This is the
Infrastructure as a Service scenario. Cloud systems can
offer an additional abstraction level: instead of supplying a
virtualized infrastructure, they can provide the software
platform where systems run on. The sizing of the hardware
resources demanded by the execution of the services is

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Vishnuprasad T, Ajith Kumar K, Abhiram C M

made in a transparent manner. This is denoted as Platform

as a Service. There are services of potential interest to a
wide variety of users hosted in Cloud systems. This is an
alternative to locally run applications. This scenario is
called Software as a Service.
Taking these features into account an encompassing
definition of the Cloud can be stated as follows: Clouds are
a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized
resources (such as hardware, development platforms and/or
services). These resources can be dynamically reconfigured
to adjust to a variable load (scale), allowing also for an
optimum resource utilization. This pool of resources is
typically exploited by a pay per-use model in which
guarantees are offered by the Infrastructure Provider by
means of customized SLAs (Service-Level Agreement).
B. Cryptographic Cloud Storage
Cloud infrastructures can be roughly categorized as
either private or public. [7] In a private cloud, the
infrastructure is managed and owned by the customer and
located on-premise. In particular, this means that access to
customer data is under its control and is only granted to
parties it trusts. In a public cloud the infrastructure is
owned and managed by a cloud service provider and is
located off-premise. This means that customer data is
outside its control and could potentially be granted to
untrusted parties. By moving their data to the cloud
customers can avoid the costs of building and maintaining
a private storage infrastructure, opting instead to pay a
service provider as a function of its needs. For most
customers, this provides several benefits including
availability and reliability at a relatively low cost. While
the benefits of using a public cloud infrastructure are clear,
it introduces significant security and privacy risks. In fact,
it seems that the biggest hurdle to the adoption of cloud
computing, in general, is the concern over the
confidentiality and integrity of data. Thus, unless the issues
of confidentiality and integrity are addressed, many
potential customers will be reluctant to make the move.
The core components of a cryptographic storage service
can be implemented using a variety of techniques, some of
which were developed specifically for cloud storage. When
preparing data for storage in the cloud, the data processor
begins by indexing it and encrypting it with a symmetric
encryption scheme under a unique key. It then encrypts the
index using a searchable encryption scheme and encrypts
the unique key with an attribute-based encryption scheme
under an appropriate policy. Finally, it encodes the
encrypted data and index in such a way that the data
verifier can later verify their integrity using a proof of
storage. A proof of storage is a protocol executed between
a client and a server with which the server can prove to the
client that it did not tamper with its data. Proofs of storage
can be either privately or publicly verifiable. Privately
verifiable proofs of storage only allow the client (i.e., the
party that encoded the file) to verify the integrity of the
data. With a publicly verifiable proof of storage, on the
other hand, anyone that possesses the clients public key
can verify the datas integrity.
C. Modern Information Retrieval
With the advent of computers, it became possible to
store large amounts of information [8]; and finding useful
information from such collections became a necessity. The

Multi Keyword Ranked Search Enabled Encryption on Cloud Data

need to store and retrieve written information became

increasingly important over the years and thus many modes
of data retrievals thus emerged. Various models for doing
document retrieval were developed and advances were
made along all dimensions of the retrieval process.
However, due to lack of availability of large text
collections, the question whether these models and
techniques would scale to larger corpora remained
unanswered. This changed with the inception of Text
Retrieval Conference, or TREC. With large text collections
available under TREC, many old techniques were
modified, and many new techniques were developed to do
effective retrieval over large collections. The algorithms
developed in IR were the first ones to be employed for
searching the World Wide Web.
Early IR systems were boolean systems which allowed
users to specify their information need using a complex
combination of boolean ANDs, ORs and NOTs. Boolean
systems have several shortcomings and it is very hard for a
user to form a good search request using such techniques.
Most everyday users of IR systems expect IR systems to do
ranked retrieval. Thus IR systems rank documents by their
estimation of the usefulness of a document for a user query.
Most IR systems assign a numeric score to every document
and rank documents by this score. Several models have
been proposed for this process. The three most used models
in IR research are the vector space model, the probabilistic
models, and the inference network model.
IR systems are based on the inverted list data structure.
This enables fast access to a list of documents that contain
a term along with other information. Inverted lists exploit
the fact that given a user query, most IR systems are only
interested in scoring a small number of documents that
contain some query term. This allows the system to only
score documents that will have a non-zero numeric score.
Most systems maintain the scores for documents in a heap
(or another similar data structure) and at the end of
processing return the top scoring documents for a query.
The two desired properties for the measurement of search
effectiveness are recall: the proportion of relevant
documents retrieved by the system; and precision: the
proportion of retrieved documents that are relevant.
The most critical piece of information needed for
document ranking in all models is a terms weight in a
document. The three main factors come into play in the
final term weighting formulation are term frequency,
document frequency and document length. A large body of
work has gone into proper estimation of these weights in
different models. Another technique that has been shown to
be effective in improving document ranking is query
modification via relevance feedback. Many other
techniques have been developed over the years and have
met with varying success. Cluster hypothesis states that
documents that cluster together will have a similar
relevance profile for a given query. Natural Language
Processing (NLP) has also been proposed as a tool to
enhance retrieval effectiveness, but has had very limited
success. Techniques developed in the field have been used
in many other areas and have yielded many new
technologies which are used by people on an everyday
basis, e.g., web search engines, junk-email filters, news
clipping services. With exponential growth in the amount

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Vishnuprasad T, Ajith Kumar K, Abhiram C M

of information available, information retrieval will play an

increasingly important role in future.
D. Secure Ranked Keyword Search
A ranked searchable encryption scheme consists of four
algorithms
(KeyGen,
BuildIndex,
TrapdoorGen,
SearchIndex) [9]. A ranked searchable symmetric
encryption system can be constructed from these four
algorithms in two phases - Setup and Retrieval.
Setup: The data owner initializes the public and secret
parameters of the system by executing KeyGen, and preprocesses the data file collection C by using BuildIndex to
generate the searchable index from the unique words
extracted from C. The owner then encrypts the data file
collection C, and publishes the index including the
keyword frequency based relevance scores in some
encrypted form, together with the encrypted collection C to
the Cloud.
Retrieval: The user uses TrapdoorGen to generate a
secure trapdoor corresponding to his interested keyword,
and submits it to the cloud server. Upon receiving the
trapdoor, the cloud server will derive a list of matched file
IDs and their corresponding encrypted relevance scores by
searching the index via SearchIndex. The matched files
should be sent back in a ranked sequence based on the
relevance scores. However, the server should learn nothing
or little beyond the order of the relevance scores. Thus,
search results can be accurately ranked based only on the
term frequency and file length information contained
within the single file.
E. Fuzzy Keyword Search
Although traditional searchable encryption schemes
allow a user to securely search over encrypted data through
keywords and selectively retrieve files of interest, these
techniques support only exact keyword search. This is
when an effective fuzzy keyword search over encrypted
cloud data can be used.
The fuzzy keyword search scheme returns the search
results according to the following rules: 1) if the users
searching input exactly matches the pre-set keyword, the
server is expected to return the files containing the
keyword. 2) if there exist typos and/or format
inconsistencies in the searching input, the server will return
the closest possible results based on pre-specified similarity
semantics. There are several methods to quantitatively
measure the string similarity. The three primitive
operations used here are 1) Substitution: changing one
character to another in a word. 2) Deletion: deleting one
character from a word. 3) Insertion: inserting a single
character into a word.
Fuzzy keyword search greatly enhances system
usability by returning the matching files when users
searching inputs exactly match the predefined keywords or
the closest possible matching files based on keyword
similarity semantics, when exact match fails [10]. Here the
technique of edit distance is used, in which keyword
similarity is quantified and an advanced technique on
constructing fuzzy keyword sets is developed, which
greatly reduces the storage and representation overheads.

Multi Keyword Ranked Search Enabled Encryption on Cloud Data

F. Secure kNN Computation on Encrypted Database

Traditional encryption methods that aim at providing
unbreakable protection are often not adequate because
they do not support the execution of applications such as
database queries on the encrypted data. However, the
problem should be studied with respect to various security
requirements, considering different attacker capabilities.
Here the focus is on k-nearest neighbour (kNN) queries,
and shows how various encryption schemes are designed to
support secure kNN query processing under different
attacker capabilities. The kNN query is an important
database analysis operation, used as a standalone query or
as a core module of common data mining tasks.
The general problem of secure computation on an
encrypted database is discussed and a model named
SCONEDB (Secure Computation ON an Encrypted
Database) is proposed in this literature. The SCONEDB
model captures the execution and security requirements.
Here the main focus is on kNN queries. How an encryption
scheme (which includes the above five components) can be
developed to securely support kNN applications under the
SCONEDB model is also illustrated here. A kNN query
searches for k points in a database that are the nearest to a
given query point q. One approach to securely support
kNN is to use distance-preserving transformation (DPT) to
encrypt data points. Given this property, kNN can be
computed on the encrypted database. Unfortunately, such
transformation is shown to be not secure in practice. If an
attacker can access the DPT-encrypted database and knows
a few points in the plain database DB, he can recover DB
entirely.
The weakness of DPT comes from the fact that the
attacker is able to recover distance information from the
encrypted database. These distances allow the attacker to
compute signatures and thus to apply the signature linking
attack.
Unfortunately,
a
scalar-product-preserving
encryption is also distance-recoverable and hence is not
secure against level-2 attacks. To resist level-2 attacks, we
need an encryption function that does not reveal distance
information. For kNN search, exact distance computation is
not necessary. Rather, only a distance comparison
operation is needed. The requirement that needed here is
that the distance recovery of an encrypted database must
not be possible. The experiments show that a scalar product
preserving encryption is also distance recoverable and
hence is not secure against level-2 attacks (Level-2 attack
example : if the attacker observes the encrypted database of
a bank and some of his sources are customers of the bank,
he then knows the values of several tuples in the plain
database.)
There are three types of scalar products: (type-1) scalar
product of a database point with itself; (type2) scalar
product of a database point with the query point; (type-3)
scalar product of two different database points p1 and p2.
Here an encryption that preserves type-2 but not type-1 or
type-3 scalar products is needed and Asymmetric Scalar
Product preserving Encryption (ASPE) is such a scheme
[11]. This justifies the need of non-distance-recoverable
encryption schemes for secure kNN computation. Thus,
there is a tradeoff between Scheme 2 and Scheme 1.

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Vishnuprasad T, Ajith Kumar K, Abhiram C M

Multi Keyword Ranked Search Enabled Encryption on Cloud Data

G. Zerber: r-Confidential Indexing for Distributed

Documents
In larger enterprises employers often need to share data
users need an indexing facility that can quickly locate
relevant documents they are allowed to access, without
(1) Leaking
documents

information

about

the

remaining

(2) Imposing a large management burden as users,

groups, and documents evolve

to achieve various severe privacy requirements in different

threat models.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work was completed with support of our guides
Prof. Vinit K. and Prof. Hafzal Rahman M. J. They are the
force behind the completion of this paper. So we would
like to express our thanks to them for their highly
appreciable support and encouragement. We would also
like to convey our gratitude to all who supported to make it
possible.

(3) Requiring users to agree on a central completely

trusted authority.
To address these problems, r-confidentiality is
proposed. It is a measure of the degree of information that
can leak from an index about inaccessible documents,
given an adversarys background knowledge of the corpus
or language statistics. Then an r-confidential global
inverted index for sensitive documents, known as Zerber, is
introduced [12].
Zerber relies on a centralized set of largely untrusted
index servers that hold posting list elements encrypted with
a k out of n secret sharing scheme, which provides
complete resistance against inappropriate information
disclosure regarding pre-existing documents even if k-1
index servers are compromised. To provide tunable
resistance to statistical attacks, Zerber employs a novel
term merging scheme that has minimal impact on index
lookup costs. Zerber guarantees freshness of shared
documents at low cost, makes economical use of network
bandwidth, requires no key management, and answers most
of the queries almost as fast as an ordinary inverted index.
Currently, Zerber returns all answers to a query, and
ranking is performed on the client side. A challenging
extension is to support top-K processing on the server side,
while maintaining the confidentiality properties. Returning
only top-K query answers will significantly reduce the
network bandwidth and processing costs at user peers.
Another interesting question is how to support query
confidentiality, even when one server has been
compromised and the adversary can view the incoming
stream of requests for posting lists. BFM leaks probabilistic
information in this situation, while the other merging
heuristics are more robust.
IV.

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[1]

CONCLUSION

It is obvious that as the days go by the internet

technology will improve. Along with that the data that will
be uploaded in the cloud will also be greater. So in this
document, for the primary occasion we term and crack the
problem of multi-keyword ranked search in excess of
encrypted cloud data, and institute a assortment of privacy
necessities. in the midst of various multi-keyword
semantics, we choose the efficient similarity measure of
coordinate matching, i.e., as many matches as possible,
to effectively capture the relevance of outsourced
documents to the query keywords, and use internal
product similarity to quantitatively evaluate such
similarity measure. For meeting the challenge of supporting
multi-keyword semantic without privacy breaches, we
propose a basic idea of MKRS using secure inner product
computation. Then, we give two improved MKRS schemes

157 | International Journal of Computer Systems, ISSN-(2394-1065), Vol. 03, Issue 02, February, 2016