Secure Boolean Search Over Encrypted Documents
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current technologies cannot perform conjunctive, disjunctive, and negation searches on encrypted documents simultaneously, posing a challenge in ensuring data privacy while allowing secure search operations.
Innovation Solution
The method involves transforming keywords into an orthonormal basis, creating resultant vectors for documents, and using these vectors for encrypted searches, allowing Boolean operations without decrypting the documents. This is achieved by generating an orthonormal basis from the index, associating each keyword with a unique vector, and performing searches using scalar products between query matrices and document vectors.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If documents are encrypted to protect data privacy, then data security is improved, but the ability to perform search operations deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary mechanism by transforming keywords into an orthonormal basis and creating resultant vectors that serve as mediators between the encrypted documents and search queries. These vectors enable search operations without requiring decryption, thus maintaining security while restoring search capability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the parameter representation from raw keywords to orthonormal basis vectors. By transforming the search space into a vector space with orthonormal properties, the system enables mathematical operations (dot products) that preserve security while allowing efficient search computations on encrypted data.
2Ease of manufacture
If all documents are encrypted with the same encryption method, then implementation simplicity is improved, but search functionality for Boolean operations deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates a universal search mechanism that handles multiple Boolean operations (AND, OR, NOT) through a single framework. The orthonormal basis transformation and resultant vector computation provide a unified approach that works for all Boolean search types, making the system both simple to implement and highly adaptable.
3Ease of operation
If the search server has access to encrypted documents, then search operations can be performed, but data privacy is compromised
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the essential search capability from the encrypted documents by creating resultant vectors that capture the semantic information needed for searching. These vectors are computed from the encrypted data without revealing the underlying keywords, allowing the search server to perform operations while the actual keyword information remains private.
Data Source
AI summary
A method to perform secure boolean search over encrypted documents is disclosed. Each document is characterized by a set of keywords, all the keywords characterizing all the documents forming an index, the index being translated in an orthonormal basis in which each keyword of the index corresponds to one and only one vector of the orthonormal basis, each document being associated with a resultant vector in the span of the orthonormal basis, the resultant vectors corresponding to all the documents being stored in an encrypted search server. The method includes steps of receiving a search query from a querier; transforming the search query in one query matrix; and determining a general result based on the result of the multiplication between the query matrix and the resultant vectors.