Generalized pattern matching string search on encrypted data in cloud systems

Searchable encryption is an important and challenging issue. It allows people to search on encrypted data. This is a very useful function when more and more people choose to host their data in the cloud and the cloud server is not fully trustable. Existing solutions for searchable encryption are only limited to some simple functions of search, such as boolean search or similarity search. In this paper, we propose a scheme for Generalized Pattern-matching String-search on Encrypted data (GPSE) in cloud systems. GPSE allows users to specify their search queries by using generalized wildcard-based string patterns (such as SQL-like patterns). It gives users great expressive power in specifying highly targeted search queries. In the framework of GPSE, we particularly implemented two most commonly used pattern matching search functions on encrypted data, the substring matching and the longest-prefix-first matching. We also prove that GPSE is secure under the known-plaintext model. Experiments over real data sets show that GPSE achieves high search accuracy.