An efficient disjunctive query enabled ranked searchable encryption scheme

Cloud computing motivates data owners to economically outsource large amounts of data to the cloud. To preserve the privacy and confidentiality of the documents, the documents need to be encrypted prior to being outsourced to the cloud. In this paper, we propose a lightweight construction that facilitates ranked disjunctive keyword (multi-keyword) searchable encryption based on probabilistic trapdoors. The security analysis yieldsthat the probabilistic trapdoors help resist distinguishability attacks. Through the computational complexity analysis we realize that our scheme outperforms similar existing schemes. We explore the use of searchable encryption in the telecom domain by implementing and deploying our proof of concept prototypeonto the British Telecommunication's Public Cloud offering and testing it over a real corpus of audio transcriptions. The extensive experimentation thereafter validates our claim that our scheme is lightweight

Fuzzy keywords enabled ranked searchable encryption scheme for a public Cloud environment

Searchable Encryption allows a user or organization to outsource their encrypted documents to a Cloud-based storage service, while maintaining the ability to perform keyword searches over the encrypted text. However, most of the existing search schemes do not take the almost certain presence of typographical errors in the documents under consideration, when trying to obtain meaningful and accurate results. This paper presents a novel ranked searchable encryption scheme that addresses this issue by supporting fuzzy keywords. The proposed construction is based on probabilistic trapdoors that help resist distinguishability attacks. This paper for the first time proposes Searchable Encryption as a Service (SEaaS). The proposed construction is deployed on the British Telecommunication’s public Cloud architecture and evaluated over a real-life speech corpus. Our security analysis yields that the construction satisfies strong security guarantees and is also quiet lightweight, by analyzing its performance over the speech corpus

A parallelized disjunctive query based searchable encryption scheme for big data

Searchable Encryption (SE) allows a client to search over large amounts of encrypted data outsourced to the Cloud. Although, this helps to maintain the confidentiality of the outsourced data but achieving privacy is a difficult and resource intensive task. With the increase in the query effectiveness, i.e., by shifting from single keyword SE to multi-keyword SE there is a notable drop in the efficiency. This motivates to make use of the advances in the multi-core architectures and multiple threads where the search can be delegated across different threads to perform search in a parallel fashion. The proposed scheme is based on probabilistic trapdoors that are formed by making use of the property of modular inverses. The use of probabilistic trapdoors helps resist distinguishability attacks. The rigorous security analysis helps us to appreciate the advantage of having a probabilistic trapdoor. Furthermore, to validate the performance of the proposed scheme, it is implemented and deployed onto the British Telecommunication's Public Cloud offering and tested over a real speech corpus. The implementation is also extended to anticipate the performance gain by using the multi-core architecture that helps to maintain the lightweight property of the scheme

A New Secure and Lightweight Searchable Encryption Scheme over Encrypted Cloud Data

Searchable Encryption is an emerging cryptographic technique that enables searching capabilities over the encrypted data on the cloud. In this paper, a novel searchable encryption scheme for the client-server architecture has been presented. The scheme exploits the properties of modular inverse to generate a probabilistic trapdoor which facilitates the searching over the secure inverted index table. We propose indistinguishability that is achieved by using the property of a probabilistic trapdoor. We design and implement a proof of concept prototype and test our scheme onto a real dataset of files. We analyze the performance of our scheme against our claim of the scheme being light weight. The security analysis yields that our scheme assures higher level of security as compared to other existing schemes

On the Challenges and Opportunities of Smart Meters in Smart Homes and Smart Grids

Nowadays, electricity companies have started applying smart grid intheir systems rather than the conventional electrical grid (manualgrid). Smart grid produces an efficient and effective energy managementand control, reduces the cost of production, saves energy and it is morereliable compared to the conventional grid. As an advanced energy meter,smart meters can measure the power consumption as well as monitor andcontrol electrical devices. Smart meters have been adopted in manycountries since the 2000s as they provide economic, social andenvironmental benefits for multiple stakeholders. The design of smartmeter can be customized depending on the customer and the utilitycompany needs. There are different sensors and devices supported bydedicated communication infrastructure which can be utilized toimplement smart meters. This paper presents a study of the challengesassociated with smart meters, smart homes and smart grids as an effortto highlight opportunities for emerging research and industrialsolutions

A unified approach to combinatorial key predistribution schemes for sensor networks

There have been numerous recent proposals for key predistribution schemes for wireless sensor networks based on various types of combinatorial structures such as designs and codes. Many of these schemes have very similar properties and are analysed in a similar manner. We seek to provide a unified framework to study these kinds of schemes. To do so, we define a new, general class of designs, termed “partially balanced t-designs”, that is sufficiently general that it encompasses almost all of the designs that have been proposed for combinatorial key predistribution schemes. However, this new class of designs still has sufficient structure that we are able to derive general formulas for the metrics of the resulting key predistribution schemes. These metrics can be evaluated for a particular scheme simply by substituting appropriate parameters of the underlying combinatorial structure into our general formulas. We also compare various classes of schemes based on different designs, and point out that some existing proposed schemes are in fact identical, even though their descriptions may seem different. We believe that our general framework should facilitate the analysis of proposals for combinatorial key predistribution schemes and their comparison with existing schemes, and also allow researchers to easily evaluate which scheme or schemes present the best combination of performance metrics for a given application scenario