Fogging the cloud — Implementing and evaluating searchable encryption schemes in practice

With the rise of cloud computing new ways to secure outsourced data have to be devised. Traditional approaches like simply encrypting all data before it is transferred only partially alleviate this problem. Searchable Encryption (SE) schemes enable the cloud provider to search for user supplied strings in the encrypted documents, while neither learning anything about the content of the documents nor about the search terms. Currently there are many different SE schemes defined in the literature, with their number steadily growing. But experimental results of real world performance, or direct comparisons between different schemes, are severely lacking. In this work we propose a simple Java client-server framework to efficiently implement different SE algorithms and compare their efficiency in practice. In addition, we demonstrate the possibilities of such a framework by implementing two different existing SE schemes from slightly different domains and compare their behavior in a real-world setting.