Privacy-Preserving Keyword Search Schemes over Encrypted Cloud Data: An Extensive Analysis

Big Data has rapidly developed into a hot research topic in many areas that attracts attention from academia and industry around the world. Many organization demands efficient solution to store, process, analyze and search huge amount of information. With the rapid development of cloud computing, organization prefers cloud storage services to reduce the overhead of storing data locally. However, the security and privacy of big data in cloud computing is a major source of concern. One of the positive ways of protecting data is encrypting it before outsourcing to remote servers, but the encrypted significant amounts of cloud data brings difficulties for the remote servers to perform any keyword search functions without leaking information. Various privacy-preserving keyword search (PPKS) schemes have been proposed to mitigate the privacy issue of big data encrypted on cloud storage. This paper presents an extensive analysis of the existing PPKS techniques in terms of verifiability, efficiency and data privacy. Through this analysis, we present some valuable directions for future work.