Personalized Search over Encrypted Data with Efficient and Secure Updates in Mobile Clouds

Mobile cloud computing has been involved as a key enabling technology to overcome the physical limitations of mobile devices toward scalable and flexible mobile services. In the mobile cloud environment, searchable encryption, which enables direct search over encrypted data, is a key technique to maintain both the privacy and usability of outsourced data in cloud. On addressing the issue, many research efforts resolve to using the searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) and searchable public-key encryption (SPE). In this paper, we improve the existing works by developing a more practical searchable encryption technique, which can support dynamic updating operations in the mobile cloud applications. Specifically, we make our efforts on taking the advantages of both the SSE and SPE techniques, and propose PSU, a Personalized Search scheme over encrypted data with efficient and secure Updates in mobile cloud. By giving thorough security analysis, we demonstrate that the PSU can achieve a high security level. Using extensive experiments in a real-world mobile environment, we show that the PUS is more efficient compared with the existing proposals.