ObliuSky: Oblivious User-Defined Skyline Query Processing in the Cloud

The proliferation of cloud computing has spurred the popularity of storing and querying databases in the cloud. Among others, skyline queries play an important role in the database field due to its usefulness in multi-criteria decision support systems. To accommodate the tailored needs of users, user-defined skyline query has recently emerged, allowing users to define custom preferences in their skyline queries. However, user-defined skyline query services, if deployed in the cloud, may raise critical privacy concerns as the outsourced databases and skyline queries may contain proprietary/privacy-sensitive information. In light of the above, this paper presents ObliuSky, a new solution enabling oblivious user-defined skyline query processing in the cloud. ObliuSky departs from prior work by not only providing confidentiality protection for the content of the outsourced database, the user-defined skyline queries, and the query results, but also hiding the data patterns (e.g., user-defined dominance relations among database points and search access patterns) which may indirectly cause data leakages. We formally analyze the security guarantees and conduct extensive performance evaluations. The results show that while achieving much stronger security guarantees than the state-of-the-art prior work, ObliuSky is superior in database and query encryption efficiency, and scalable in oblivious query processing.

I. Introduction

It has been increasingly common for enterprises and organizations to outsource the storage and management of databases to the cloud, which can then provide services for query processing over the outsourced databases. Among others, skyline queries play an important role in the database field, garnering wide attentions in various application domains due to its prominent advantages in multi-criteria decision support systems [1], [2], [3]. However, skyline query services, if deployed in the cloud, may raise critical privacy concerns regarding the outsourced databases and skyline queries, which may contain proprietary/privacy-sensitive information. Moreover, the cloud might even suffer from data breaches [4], [5] which would seriously harm data privacy. These critical concerns necessitate the development of security mechanisms for deploying the skyline query service in the cloud, providing protections for the outsourced databases, skyline queries, and query results.