Cyber Times International Journal of Technology & Management

Cloud computing has recently emerged as a new paradigm for hosting and delivering services over the Internet. Data security and confidentiality issues are the main obstacles that make the cloud user reluctant towards the cloud services. Confidentiality can be achieved by encrypted outsourced content before outsourcing to cloud servers. While cryptographic storage provides strong security, database operation like searching, querying and indexing of data become a difficult task. Searches on this huge (i.e. terabytes) amount of encrypted data demands high computational as well as communicational cost. Another performance bottleneck with cloud storage is their distributed natures that demand the parallel operation on cloud servers. In this distributed nature of cloud servers an efficient conjunctive keyword search over encrypted data can greatly enhance the user’s confidence in cloud computing. Thus, there is a need to explore the issues related with the searchable encryption technique for further improvements.