Edge-Based Efficient Search over Encrypted Data Mobile Cloud Storage

Smart sensor-equipped mobile devices sense, collect, and process data generated by the edge network to achieve intelligent control, but such mobile devices usually have limited storage and computing resources. Mobile cloud storage provides a promising solution owing to its rich storage resources, great accessibility, and low cost. But it also brings a risk of information leakage. The encryption of sensitive data is the basic step to resist the risk. However, deploying a high complexity encryption and decryption algorithm on mobile devices will greatly increase the burden of terminal operation and the difficulty to implement the necessary privacy protection algorithm. In this paper, we propose ENSURE (EfficieNt and SecURE), an efficient and secure encrypted search architecture over mobile cloud storage. ENSURE is inspired by edge computing. It allows mobile devices to offload the computation intensive task onto the edge server to achieve a high efficiency. Besides, to protect data security, it reduces the information acquisition of untrusted cloud by hiding the relevance between query keyword and search results from the cloud. Experiments on a real data set show that ENSURE reduces the computation time by 15% to 49% and saves the energy consumption by 38% to 69% per query.