Biblio

Documents are a common method of storing infor-mation and one of the most conventional forms of expression of ideas. Cloud servers store a user's documents with thousands of other users in place of physical storage devices. Indexes corresponding to the documents are also stored at the cloud server to enable the users to retrieve documents of their interest. The index includes keywords, document identities in which the keywords appear, along with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) values which reflect the keywords' relevance scores of the dataset. Currently, there are no efficient methods to delete keywords from millions of documents over cloud servers while avoiding any compromise to the user's privacy. Most of the existing approaches use algorithms that divide a bigger problem into sub-problems and then combine them like divide and conquer problems. These approaches don't focus entirely on fine-grained deletion. This work is focused on achieving fine-grained deletion of keywords by keeping the size of the TF-IDF matrix constant after processing the deletion query, which comprises of keywords to be deleted. The experimental results of the proposed approach confirm that the precision of ranked search still remains very high after deletion without recalculation of the TF-IDF matrix.

Searchable Encryption (SE) schemes provide security and privacy to the cloud data. The existing SE approaches enable multiple users to perform search operation by using various schemes like Broadcast Encryption (BE), Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), etc. However, these schemes do not allow multiple users to perform the search operation over the encrypted data of multiple owners. Some SE schemes involve a Proxy Server (PS) that allow multiple users to perform the search operation. However, these approaches incur huge computational burden on PS due to the repeated encryption of the user queries for transformation purpose so as to ensure that users' query is searchable over the encrypted data of multiple owners. Hence, to eliminate this computational burden on PS, this paper proposes a secure proxy server approach that performs the search operation without transforming the user queries. This approach also returns the top-k relevant documents to the user queries by using Euclidean distance similarity approach. Based on the experimental study, this approach is efficient with respect to search time and accuracy.