SGX-Based Secure Indexing System

With the rising popularity of cloud computing technology, many positive effects have been exerted, whereas many security issues arise. The main existing way to ensure data confidentiality is to encrypt the data. However, the encrypted data renders keyword indexing more difficult to achieve, and the way to specify the plain-text keywords for the cipher-text data also reveals the privacy of the data owner to the untrusted service provider. In the meantime, many challenges are imposed on the software-based methods to index encrypted data, and existing hardware-based solutions typically have a large code footprint in a trusted environment. To solve these problems, an SGX-based secure indexing solution was built based on the combination of hardware and software and using Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology. The results of the security analysis suggest that our scheme only leaks the access patterns, and our trust code protected by the SGX hardware is very small, thereby minimizing the exposed attack surface. Besides, our experiments verify that our scheme is efficient and practical, both in performance and storage aspects.