Towards Differential Query Services in Cost-Efficient Clouds

Abstract

As a characteristic cloud application an organization pledge the cloud services and approves its team to share files in the cloud. Each file is explained by a set of keywords and the staff as authorized users can repossess files of their interests by querying the cloud with certain keywords. In such an environment how to protect user privacy from the cloud which is a third party outside the security boundary of the organization turn into a key problem. The communication cost acquires on the cloud will also be concentrated since files shared by the users need to be returned only once. Most significantly by using a series of secure functions COPS can protect user privacy from the ADL the cloud and other users. The main drawback is that it will cause a heavy querying overhead incurred on the cloud and thus goes against the original intention of cost efficiency. In this paper we present a method termed efficient information retrieval for ranked query (EIRQ) based on an aggregation and distribution layer (ADL) to condense querying overhead deserved on the cloud.