Search-as-a-Service: Outsourced Search over Outsourced Storage

Abstract

With fast-paced growth of digital data and exploding storage management costs, enterprises are looking for new ways to effectively manage their data. One such cost-effective paradigm is the cloud storage model also referred to as Storage-as-a-Service, in which enterprises outsource their storage to a storage service provider (SSP) by storing data (usually encrypted) at a remote SSPmanaged site and accessing it over a high speed network. Along with storage capacity used, the SSP often charges clients on the amount of data that is accessed from the SSP site. Thus, it is in the interest of the client enterprise to download only relevant content. This makes search over outsourced storage an important capability. Searching over encrypted outsourced storage, however, is a complex challenge. Each enterprise has different access privileges for different users and this access control needs to be preserved during search (for example, ensuring that a user cannot search through data that is inaccessible from the filesystem due to its permissions). Secondly, the search mechanism has to preserve confidentiality from the SSP and indices can not be stored in plain text. In this article, we present a new filesystem search technique that integrates access control and indexing/search mechanisms into a unified framework to support access control aware search. Our approach performs indexing within the trusted enterprise domain and uses a novel access control barrel (ACB) primitive to encapsulate access control within these indices. The indices are then systematically encrypted and shipped to the SSP for hosting. Unlike existing enterprise search techniques, our approach is resilient to various common attacks that leak private information. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, our approach is a first such technique that allows search indices to be hosted at the SSP site, thus effectively providing search-as-a-service. This does not require the client enterprise to fully trust the SSP for data confidentiality. We describe the architecture and implementation of our approach and a detailed experimental analysis comparing with other approaches. © 2009, ACM. All rights reserved.