Efficient and Accurate Dictionary Partition-Based Multi-Keyword Ranked Search Scheme in Cloud

The increase in the amount of data stored in the cloud leads to the need for privacy-preserving multi-keyword search schemes in the cloud. However, most of the existing schemes usually adopt the TF-IDF vector space model, in which the vectors are high-dimensional and sparse. It results in substantial computation time and storage space. To address the issue, we propose an efficient dictionary partition-based multi-keyword ranked search scheme (DPMRS) over encrypted cloud data. First, a dictionary partition-based vector space model (DPVSM) is designed, which can compress vector dimensions and hence accelerate relevance score computation between documents and search keywords. Based on DPVSM, a dictionary partition-based keyword distribution inverted index (DPKD-index) is presented. By using the index, a baseline privacy-preserving ranked search scheme is proposed. To further improve the efficiency of search services, the search tree structure is adopted and a novel double tier search tree-based index (DSTree-index) is designed. By using the optimized index, an enhanced search scheme (DPMRS+) is proposed. The security analysis indicates that the proposed scheme can protect the privacy of search processing, and the experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing works in terms of storage size, search precision, and search time cost.