Biblio

Security and confidentiality of big data stored in the cloud are important concerns for many organizations to adopt cloud services. One common approach to address the concerns is client-side encryption where data is encrypted on the client machine before being stored in the cloud. Having encrypted data in the cloud, however, limits the ability of data clustering, which is a crucial part of many data analytics applications, such as search systems. To overcome the limitation, in this paper, we present an approach named ClustCrypt for efficient topic-based clustering of encrypted unstructured big data in the cloud. ClustCrypt dynamically estimates the optimal number of clusters based on the statistical characteristics of encrypted data. It also provides clustering approach for encrypted data. We deploy ClustCrypt within the context of a secure cloud-based semantic search system (S3BD). Experimental results obtained from evaluating ClustCrypt on three datasets demonstrate on average 60% improvement on clusters' coherency. ClustCrypt also decreases the search-time overhead by up to 78% and increases the accuracy of search results by up to 35%.

Cloud service providers offer a low-cost and convenient solution to host unstructured data. However, cloud services act as third-party solutions and do not provide control of the data to users. This has raised security and privacy concerns for many organizations (users) with sensitive data to utilize cloud-based solutions. User-side encryption can potentially address these concerns by establishing user-centric cloud services and granting data control to the user. Nonetheless, user-side encryption limits the ability to process (e.g., search) encrypted data on the cloud. Accordingly, in this research, we provide a framework that enables processing (in particular, searching) of encrypted multiorganizational (i.e., multi-source) big data without revealing the data to cloud provider. Our framework leverages locality feature of edge computing to offer a user-centric search ability in a realtime manner. In particular, the edge system intelligently predicts the user's search pattern and prunes the multi-source big data search space to reduce the search time. The pruning system is based on efficient sampling from the clustered big dataset on the cloud. For each cluster, the pruning system dynamically samples appropriate number of terms based on the user's search tendency, so that the cluster is optimally represented. We developed a prototype of a user-centric search system and evaluated it against multiple datasets. Experimental results demonstrate 27% improvement in the pruning quality and search accuracy.