Secure Query Processing over Encrypted Data Using a Distributed Index Structure for Outsourcing Sensitive Data

As the outsourcing of sensitive data has been spotlighted, data encryption schemes are required to protect the data. Accordingly, it is necessary to develop not only a distributed index structure to efficiently manage the large amount of encrypted data, but also a query processing scheme over the encrypted data. Meanwhile, the existing query processing schemes over the encrypted data cannot support top-k query processing algorithm which aim to quickly retrieve k number of the highest ranking tuples. To solve the problems, in this paper, we propose a secure query processing scheme over the encrypted data using a distributed index structure. The proposed distributed index structure guarantees data privacy preservation and performance improvement for the various types of queries. Finally, we show from our performance analysis that our proposed index structure and secure query processing scheme are suitable for protecting the data privacy of the sensitive data.