Towards verifiable file search on the cloud

Cloud storage security has attracted a lot of research interest in recent years with the large-scale application of cloud computing. Although there is considerable work on verifying the integrity of the outsourced data in the cloud, research on verifying the file search results returned from the cloud is still lacking. To fill this gap, in this paper, we tackle the verifiable file search problem and propose two protocols to solve the verifiable file search problem. The baseline protocol can achieve the key verifiability property and the enhanced full-fledged protocol can further preserve the user's privacy by protecting the confidentiality of queried filenames while achieving the same level of verifiability as the baseline protocol. We conduct theoretical analysis to prove the correctness of the developed protocols and their security and privacy properties, along with overhead. We implement both the baseline and enhanced protocols and the resulting experimental data validates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed protocols.