Return just your search: privacy-preserving homoglyph search for arbitrary languages

Searchable encryption is an effective way to ensure the security and availability of encrypted outsourced cloud data. Among existing solutions, the keyword exact search solution is relatively inflexible, while the fuzzy keyword search solution either has a high index overhead or suffers from the false-positive. Furthermore, no existing fuzzy keyword search solution considers the homoglyph search on encrypted data. In this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving homoglyph search scheme supporting arbitrary languages (POSA, in short). We enhance the performance of the fuzzy keyword search in three aspects. Firstly, we formulate the similarity of homoglyph and propose a privacy-preserving homoglyph search. Secondly, we put forward an index build mechanism without the false-positive, which reduces the storage overhead of the index and is suitable for arbitrary languages. Thirdly, POSA returns just the user’s search, i.e., all returned documents contain the search keyword or its homoglyph. The theoretical analysis and experimental evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of POSA.