Privacy-Preserving Basic Operations on Outsourced Search Trees

Security issues in outsourcing database services have recently attracted special attention in the research community. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of the previous work has radically addressed the problem of preserving privacy for basic operations on outsourced search trees. Basic operations of search trees include search and updates. Search trees have played a fundamental and vital role in both traditional and modern database application domains due to their efficiency in managing the storage and retrieval of data. The outsourced search trees and data are all encrypted and stored at some untrusted server. In this paper, we will discuss security issues in outsourced databases that come together with search trees, and present techniques to ensure privacy in the execution of these trees’ basic operations on the untrusted server. By privacy, we mean the outsourced tree structure and data as well as user’s queries are all hidden from unauthorized people.