Confidentiality-Preserving Query Execution of Fragmented Outsourced Data

Ensuring confidentiality of outsourced data continues to be an area of active research in the field of privacy protection. Almost all existing privacy-preserving approaches to address this problem rely on heavyweight cryptographic techniques with a large computational overhead that makes inefficient on large databases. In this paper, we address this problem by improving on an existing approach based on a combination of fragmentation and encryption. We present a method for optimizing and executing queries over distributed fragments stored in different Cloud storage service providers. We then extend this approach by presenting a Private Information Retrieval (PIR) based query technique to enforce data confidentiality under a collaborative Cloud storage service providers model.