A Secure Index Management Scheme for Providing Data Sharing in Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is provided as a service in order to keep pace with the increasing use of digital information. It can be used to store data via networks and various devices and is easy to access. Unlike existing removable storage, many users can use cloud storage because it has no storage capacity limit and does not require a storage medium. Cloud storage reliability has become a topic of importance, as many users employ it for saving great volumes of data. For protection against unethical administrators and attackers, a variety of cryptography systems, such as searchable encryption and proxy re-encryption, are being applied to cloud storage systems. However, the existing searchable encryption technology is inconvenient to use in a cloud storage environment where users upload their data. This is because this data is shared with others, as necessary, and the users with whom the data is shared change frequently. In this paper, we propose a searchable re-encryption scheme in which a user can safely share data with others by generating a searchable encryption index and then re-encrypt it. Keywords—Searchable Encryption, Proxy Re-Encryption, Index Management, Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage