MULTI-KEYWORD SEARCH EMPLOYING IDENTITY-BASED ENCRYPTION TECHNIQUE (MKS-IDE)

Secured storage in cloud computing has been one of the challenging areas in research. Searching and retrieval of outsourced encrypted data is very difficult due to the voluminous data stored in cloud. Various strategies need to be devise to eradicate unauthorized access, retrieval and use of such data. Employing a secured scheme for an outsourced data is very relevant in order to protect the confidentiality and privacy of the data content. In this work, we propose a Multi-Keyword Search employing Identity-based Encryption techniques (MKS-IDE) which enables a data user to search for and retrieve encrypted files that has been outsourced into the cloud by a data owner. The retrieved encrypted files are ranked based on their relevance scores and the top-k relevant files are returned by the cloud to the data user. The data user then obtains a decryption key from the appropriate data owner to decrypt his selected file. The security requirement of our scheme is provably secure and the performance of our scheme is also more efficient as compared to other PEKS schemes.