IIT-KGP researchers develop solution to access encrypted data

Researchers at IIT Kharagpur have developed a technological solution to access encrypted data on cloud server with keywords without compromising the security of the system.
The solution has been developed by researchers at the Secured Embedded Architecture Lab (SEAL) of the institute, an IIT-Kharagpur release said.
The research has led to Controlled Access Searchable Encryption (CASE), a new public-key searchable encryption, which, the release said, allows a data owner to generate a controlled-search access that can restrict the search capabilities of a data user to a specific sub-set of documents in the collection. "This protects the vulnerability of the full data set."

"CASE also preserves the privacy of the underlying plain text data under well-known cryptographic assumptions," it said quoting Prod Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, the lead researcher of the project and director of incubation at Embedded Security and Privacy Pvt Ltd (ESP), STEP (Science and Technology Entrepreneurs' Park)of IIT Kharagpur.
Cryptography is the science or study of the techniques of secret writing, especially code and methods.
"CASE requires optimal network communication between the server and the data owners/data users. Additionally, CASE is ideal for use in cloud-based search applications," Mukhopadhyay said.

"We are expecting to have a full-fledged prototype implementation of our controlled-access searchable encryption set-up by the end of 2017.

"We hope to convert the present work from a prototype implementation to a usable system. We will then look to expand into potential technology transfer avenues," he said.
Cloud computing has introduced various solutions with efficient sharing and independent access to large volumes of data and these solutions are being used across corporations, governments and by people.
However, security issues run high as well with possible leakages of sensitive data such as customer transactions, search histories, credit card numbers, corporation and government policies and personally identifiable information.