The Research and Outlook for Keyword-Based Searchable Encryption in Cloud Storage

In cloud computing, users usually outsource their private data to the cloud storage to save the local storage space and reduce the management costs. Cloud storage is a commonly used cloud computing service which enables users to remotely access data in a cloud anytime and anywhere, using any device, in a pay-as-you-go manner. To protect the confidentiality and privacy of the stored data on the remote untrusted cloud server, cryptographic methods have to be applied. Searchable Encryption (SE) is a recently developed cryptographic primitive that supports keyword search over encrypted data, which enables users to encrypt their sensitive data and store it to the remote server, while retaining the ability to search by keywords. The search process of SE is as follows: A user sends to the server a secret token, the token could be a transformation of the queried keywords; then the server searches the encrypted data according to the token and returns the matched documents. The main purpose of this paper is to research the SE based on keywords in cloud storage. Firstly, we introduce the research background and the current development of SE schemes. Then, we review and make comparison of some related SE schemes. Finally, some issues that need to solve are list.