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Return just your search: privacy-preserving homoglyph search for arbitrary languages

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Abstract

Searchable encryption is an effective way to ensure the security and availability of encrypted outsourced cloud data. Among existing solutions, the keyword exact search solution is relatively inflexible, while the fuzzy keyword search solution either has a high index overhead or suffers from the false-positive. Furthermore, no existing fuzzy keyword search solution considers the homoglyph search on encrypted data. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving homoglyph search scheme supporting arbitrary languages (POSA, in short). We enhance the performance of the fuzzy keyword search in three aspects. Firstly, we formulate the similarity of homoglyph and propose a privacy-preserving homoglyph search. Secondly, we put forward an index build mechanism without the false-positive, which reduces the storage overhead of the index and is suitable for arbitrary languages. Thirdly, POSA returns just the user’s search, i.e., all returned documents contain the search keyword or its homoglyph. The theoretical analysis and experimental evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of POSA.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the editor-in-chief, associate editor and reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Moreover, Bowen Zhao would especially like to thank professor Shaohua Tang, the late doctoral supervisor, for his guidance and help. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. U1804263 and 61702105).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Bowen Zhao, Shaohua Tang & Yiming Wu

  2. Zheng Zhiming Lab, Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, 518055, China

    Shaohua Tang

  3. College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou, 350108, China

    Ximeng Liu

Authors
  1. Bowen Zhao
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  2. Shaohua Tang
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  3. Ximeng Liu
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  4. Yiming Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ximeng Liu.

Additional information

Bowen Zhao received his BS and MS degree in information security from Hunan University of Science and Technology and Guangxi University, China in 2014 and 2017, respectively. He is currently pursuing his PhD degree from South China University of Technology, China. His research interests include information security and privacy-preserving in mobile crowdsensing and cloud computing. He is a student member of the CCF.

Shaohua Tang received the BS and MS degrees in applied mathematics from the South China University of Technology, China in 1991 and 1994, respectively, and the PhD degree in communication and information system from the South China University of Technology, China in 1998. He has been a Full Professor with the School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, China, since 2004. He is also a jointly appointed full professor with the Peng Cheng Laboratory, China. He has authored or co-authored over 100 technical papers in journals and conference proceedings. His current research interests include information security, data security, and privacy-preserving in cloud computing and big data. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society.

Ximeng Liu received the BSc degree in electronic engineering and the PhD degree in Cryptography from Xidian University, China in 2010 and 2015, respectively. Now he is the full professor in the College of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fuzhou University, China. Also, he was a research fellow at the School of Information System, Singapore Management University, Singapore. He has published more than 200 papers on the topics of cloud security and big data security papers in IEEE Trans. He awards “Minjiang Scholars” Distinguished Professor, “Qishan Scholars” at Fuzhou University, and ACM SIGSAC China Rising Star Award (2018). His research interests include cloud security, applied cryptography and big data security. He is a member of the IEEE, ACM, and CCF.

Yiming Wu received the BS degree in software engineering in the direction of information security from Wuhan University of Technology, China in 2017. He is currently pursuing his MS degree from South China University of Technology, China. His research interests include information security and blockchain technology.

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Zhao, B., Tang, S., Liu, X. et al. Return just your search: privacy-preserving homoglyph search for arbitrary languages. Front. Comput. Sci. 16, 162801 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-020-0102-1

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