A Technique for Handling Range and Fuzzy Match Queries on Encrypted Data

Shaukat Ali, Azhar Rauf, and Huma Javed
Department of Computer Science, University of Peshawar, Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

 
Abstract: Data is an important asset of today’s dynamically operating organizations and their businesses. Data is usually stored in databases. An important issue for IT professionals is to secure such data from unauthorized access and intruders. For protecting business centric data, many levels of security are used. Among these levels, data encryption is the final layer of security. Although encryption makes it difficult to breach this level of security, but it has a potential disadvantage of performance degradation, particularly for those queries which require operations on encrypted data. This work proposes to allow users to query over the encrypted column directly without decrypting it. This improves the performance of the SELECT query. In this technique the query retrieves only those records fulfilling the user’s search criteria and the data will be decrypted on the fly. The proposed algorithm handles range, fuzzy match, and exact match type queries. It has no “false positive hits”.  From experimental findings the algorithm has shown greater efficiency than the state of art technique.

Keywords: Database security, encryption, performance.

 

Received June 27 2010; accepted March 1, 2011

  

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