New technique to fast-track deployment of searchable encryption

New technique to fast-track deployment of searchable encryption

Abu Dhabi-UAE: Cloud storage services, such as Google Drive and Dropbox, have made it easier to share documents and files across devices and among several collaborators. While these service providers password protect access to the account, the cloud service itself generally has access to the files, making it easier for users to search, navigate, and edit files. However, in certain cases, users may choose to encrypt files before saving them, making it harder to search and find the documents using the cloud service if the user makes changes to a document, they must then download all the documents, decrypt them, re-encrypt them with the newly updated document, and finally save them again.

With that issue in mind, researchers have been exploring searchable encryption techniques to improve cloud storage security that still enable search. Dr. Chiara Marcolla, Lead Cryptographer at the Technology Innovation Institute’s (TII) Cryptography Research Center, explained, “Searchable encryption tries to find a way to encrypt the data so that when you search for something in the data, you can do it in a way that the cloud service will not know what you searched for and what it gives you back.”

However, each approach comes with some trade-offs between security